Vitamin C dosing for zoanthids (I am clueless)

[ReeferRob]

RR, Double your dosage.

Will do. Ive been removing a cup of water from the tank and disolving the VC in to the water then putting it back in the tank. Is this an okay way to dose? Probably should have asked this question a long time ago but hey....
Oh and thanks for all the advice Puffer.

 

[Pufferpunk]

No problem! If there is no skimmer or sump to add it to, that that will have to do.

 

[hardcz]

Well...during my testing my skimmer stopped working for about a week, and I got a temp one on there, and about 2 weeks after I finally got mine back and running...not sure how that'll effect the results...but you have the before on the left and after on the right of a month of doing maybe 4ppm vit c. Please remember, due to angles and such, things might look slightly different, but you should be able to determine for yourself at least at this level what kind of change if any that you might receive and decide to try a higher dose or not if any.

 

[Pufferpunk]

It's so hard to see small changes (especially in color) with pics. Was the camera set exactly the same for both? No Photoshop, even to bring back natural colors? What do you think? 4ppm isn't much...

 

[ZOABOY]

I stopped dosing it killed 3 colonys of my Zoas since then my tank is doing way better with out Vit C...

 

[ReeferRob]

No problem! If there is no skimmer or sump to add it to, that that will have to do.

Should be up in a week or so.
Very cloudy today, but everything is looking HUGE and I can start to see coloration changes. Zoos are starting to open up as well!!!

 

[hardcz]

as close as the same position as possible, but you know how things go, sometimes they angle differently one day than the other..... those are raw pics from my camera resized into photoshop then blasted into a jpg.

 

[Pufferpunk]

I stopped dosing it killed 3 colonys of my Zoas since then my tank is doing way better with out Vit C...

Sorry to hear that. Were they doing pooorly before dosing? Can you explain your dosing process?

 

[salty_newbie]

My ORP drops from 300+ down to less than 10 when I dose. Is this normal? I just started 2 days ago. But it seems like it is very unhealthly for the ORP to drop so much so rapidly (in under 20 minutes) then it rises back up to over 300 over the course of the next hour or so...

 

[Pufferpunk]

Yes this is normal & has done no harm my inhabitants.

 

[labman]

Talked to Eric Borneman a while back about dosing vitamins he said not too. he said basically this hobby has too many medicine men and witch doctors and too many people willing to try what ever they tell us too. biggest pet peeve is the number of products for our tanks that say 100% reef safe yet don't list a single ingredient. I will watch though so far not convinced!

 

[Pufferpunk]

I tried to get Eric to help me with this project but all he kept saying is his zoas grow like weeds so why would he want to add something to make them grow more? What about us that have huge losses from our zoas melting? My tank has never looked better! My red turf algae is almost all gone, my nitrate is undetectable, my zoas are multiplying like "weeds", my leathers & LPS are huge & everything is much more colorful. You will have to pry this stuff from my cold, dead hands, before I'll stop dosing VC.

 

[labman]

ha

I tried to get Eric to help me with this project but all he kept saying is his zoas grow like weeds so why would he want to add something to make them grow more? What about us that have huge losses from our zoas melting? My tank has never looked better! My red turf algae is almost all gone, my nitrate is undetectable, my zoas are multiplying like "weeds", my leathers & LPS are huge & everything is much more colorful. You will have to pry this stuff from my cold, dead hands, before I'll stop dosing VC.

I could have told you that Eric doesn't like Additives at all other then the basics at least. I would have to look at many more people dosing before I try Stephen Pro might be more willing to test the stuff. as for Eric he would never just dump stuff in. he doesn't even do water changes. let alone additives

 

[Pufferpunk]

I actually did speak to Steven & Adam this weekend at IMAC neither one was against dosing. Both saw my tanks over the weekend--you might want to ask them what they thought. My guess would be it is way overstocked with mixed corals... but very colorful!

Here is some info just posted over at RC:
"I really think we are off track thinking of ascorbic acid as a carbon source. I have been researching this a bit now and have found no scientific evidence that ascorbic acid or its products post oxidation as a useful carbon source for any organism. Ascorbic acid is a sugar acid, but that does not mean it can be used as an energy source or carbon source, whether whole or oxidized.

What is known, is that ascorbate (read ascorbic acid or vitamin C) plays a critical role in the metabolic process of photosynthetic organisms, as a component in the antioxidant system, that protect against oxidative damage resulting from aerobic metabolism, photosynthesis and a range of pollutants.

It is also known that ascorbate is a cofactor with hydroxylase enzymes. Ascorbate oxidase (the product of ascorbate and hydroxylase enzyme) is known to control cellular growth. High ascorbate oxidase activity is also associated with rapidly expanding cells.

So in sort, ascorbate plays an important function as an antioxidant defense (oxygen related toxins produced from photosynthesis) and as an important function in growth regulation of cells.

Also keep in mind that I focused on the function of ascorbate in photosynthetic organisms, in mammals and other animals it also plays a critical role in enzymatic reactions which is why we call it a Vitamin and the functional range that ascorbate is used in metabolic processes is extremely vast among species.

This information was summarized from peer reviewed scientific journals. I did not add the citations in fear that people would turned off by it as being "too much", but if you would like more info, references, etc please let me know."

 

[ReeferRob]

I stopped dosing one week ago today. I didn't like the excesive cloudyness. I showed no improvement to my zoos and minimal improvement in color in the clam and ricordeas.

 

[salty_newbie]

I stopped after 3 days... all my acros and montis started to bleach so I thought well thats pretty whack... I will prolly just throw this crap away unless someone wants it.

 

[Pufferpunk]

I'll take it! My SPS are nice & bright, no cloudiness here either.

More good info from RC:
Ascorbate is a cofactor in several enzymatic pathways and can also scavenge free radicals so is used by the cell as an antioxidant the only pathway I could locate in my biochem text was about collagen production, which I'm guessing is not relevant to corals. (Edit: I looked this up, soft corals, including zoanthids ARE made up of collagen and it turns out that in the literature ascorbate plays an important role in the stimulation of collagen production, which would contribute to cell growth and repair).

Upon looking at the ascorbate molecule again, I realize that it does not look anything like glucose the only similarity is that it they both are made up of C,H, and O, but this is true of a large percentage of biomolecules.

I won't give you the chemical differences without speaking with you because they're too numerous and involve too much chemistry to explain over gchat.

There is not going to be a biochemical pathway for the transformation of ascorbic acid to glucose because this would require an energy input and would be inefficient, also as I said before, cells do not use a compound that has a specific and important biological function as an energy (also termed carbon) source. This is because the production or import of this compound into the cell is highly regulated and also because these compounds are required in smaller quantities and are also found in smaller quantities in the environment than preferred carbon sources.

If you want to understand this concept more thoroughly, you will have to invest some time in reading the chapters in a biology textbook that concern cell metabolism and regulation. I can also tell you that glucose is not broken down into ascorbic acid because glucose is broken down in a well-defined pathway you can look up glycolysis in a text book if you want, at any rate there is no good reason to believe that vitamin C acts as anything other than an antioxidant because this is one of its major functions in all cells, whereas its metabolism for the purpose of energy production is never reported in texts or literature.

Follow up on ascorbate and collagen production:

Here is a paper with the finding that ascorbic acid significantly increases the production of collagen in both a soft and hard coral. The two species in this article are Xenia elongate (pulsing xenia) and Montipora digitata, both common corals kept by reefers.

So ascorbate could be acting on two fronts. 1) An antioxidant that neutralizes toxic oxygen radicals produced in photosynthesis and 2) In growth, acting as a stimulant in collagen production, the major structural component of soft corals.

Here is the citation, again if you would like the pdf please let me know.

Helman, Yael, Natale, Frank, Sherrell, Robert M., et al. Extracellular matrix production and calcium carbonate precipitation by coral cells in vitro 2008

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/105/1/54

 

[liveforphysics]

I'm going to start dosing 5000mg in my unskimmed 380gal SPS/mixed reef today.

I'm not having any problems with SPS, but I can't seem to get growth from my cespitularia.

Thank you for the idea.

-Luke

 

[Pufferpunk]

Good luck. There is even more great info on this at RC recently. The thread is really getting interesting--a lot of great scientific explainations now. I really am leaning towards the idea that the VC is helping with collagen growth. It sure helps me to look younger!

 

[liveforphysics]

For my first dose, I used 20 x 500mg tablets (10g) of unbuffered VC pills. I disolved them in warm RO water, then dumped them in.

I added it at 6am this morning. As of lights out this evening, everything looks like normal.

Do you think I should keep with the 10g/day dose, or cut back to 5g?

Best Wishes,
-Luke