water too clean?

[terrypercula]

Is this a fallacy? Or is it really possible for a piece to melt away from water being too "clean." Pretty interested to hear others responses to this. Reason I posted this in the LPS forum is I seem to hear this theory most commonly with LPS pieces.

 

[MechEng99]

I don't buy it. Healthy photosynthetic corals get most of their food from zooxanthallae. I've run low-nutrient tanks for quite a few years now with no detrimental effects. Now...the key word in the previous sentence was "healthy". Sure, feeding them often speeds up growth as well, but I've never seen one "melt away" from clean water.

 

[Reef Frog]

For LPS & SPS, I think you need to go through extreme measures to make the water so clean that these corals melt en mass.

But I believe water can be too clean to the point where it is no longer able to support some mushrooms & Ricordia IME. I grew these very well - plenty of reproduction - for the first 1.5 years in the hobby.

But after that I got serious about nutrient export due to a bryopsis outbreak. Reproduction stopped, the Rics all disappeared, almost all the common mushrooms went away too but 2 have hung on but are so tiny you barely see them. But if I get lax on changing out the GFO for example a few plumes of algae might appear and the remaining mushrooms will expand.

So based on this observation of cause & effect I believe water can be too clean for some organisms, but you'd have to work awfully hard to melt stony corals this way. But some low levels of NO3 or PO4 do support the bottom of the ecosystem IMO.