Are elevated nutrients a problem, or not?

[jda]

My tanks are always going to have about .1, or less, of no3. I love a 2-3 inch sandbed that I periodically maintain and it chews through nitrate and my nitrates will always be that low. My current tank hovers at ocean type po4 levels at around 1-3 ppb, but that is just how it runs with multiple skimmers, fuge where I prune chaeto like crazy. If the po4 got to .05, I would not likely worry at all - I have run tanks like this in the past. This is a 1:2 no3 to po4 ratio.

Everybody has to Shake It Off with their thinking that no3 and po4 are the only thing that matters to deliver nitrogen and phosphorous. Their minds need some Blank Space to understand that this is just a small portion of the larger picture and likely the least important, at least for no3 delivering nitrogen which most corals cannot use directly. august is over after a Cruel Summer and with less daylight until we are Back to December, there is more time to study up on the difference between building blocks and energy and stuff. I know that this is somewhat abstract since you sometimes just have to trust the process since you cannot test for a lot of this stuff, but Don't Blame Me if you get results that you don't want since just looking at no3 and po4 does not really tell you much of anything.

Seriously, some true coral cannot even get nitrogen from nitrate and those that can have to convert it back to ammonia/ammonium at a cost of 30-70% extra energy (nobody seems to know for sure), so doing a ratio on this is not all that helpful. I don't know about softies since I don't really keep them, but Nems also not appear able to use no3 directly and also get nitrogen from ammonia or nitrite.

 

[Reefahholic]

There's something to be said about survival of the fittest.

Or there’s something to be said about watching your chemistry. Haha

 

[Miami Reef]

Shake It Off

Blank Space

august

Back to December

Cruel Summer

daylight

Don't Blame Me

As a major swiftie, my mouth was dropped the entire time reading your post. Do you also listen to her music?

I went to the reputation and eras tour. I know every single song. I bought all her albums. She’s literally my all-time favorite artist.

I would never imagine you posting this!

 

[jda]

Multiple daughters...

 

[jason2459]

Interesting topic. My body certainly grows really well with elevated nutrients, why wouldn't my corals?

 

[Miami Reef]

Multiple daughters...

Do you believe LPS corals can do well with lower NO3/PO4 if someone were to have a lot of fish with heavy feedings?

So many times I’ve read that “higher nutrients cause LPS to look fluffier”

Ps, your daughters have good taste, and I am convinced you like it, at least a little, too. There’s no other explanation on how you have all those song titles memorized, used the songs in sentences, and gave a “Taylor Swift fans at a beach” metaphor all in one night.

 

[jda]

I grow a few chalices in my tanks. They grow fast. Too much waste no3 and po4 makes most LPS get more brown but not sure that many would notice under heavy blue lights. My CSBs, jawbreakers and bounces grow as fast as anybody else's and look great.

I am not too big of a fan... I though that Daylight was on that album where they don't capitalize anything, but I did get august right.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

I know everyone’s got their thing that works. But when we look for a rule of thumb I’ve yet to see one that is true for all tanks aside from this.

I have heard the mentality of the ratio being nonsense. But I haven’t heard anyone say their tanks succeed outside that radio, yet. The ratio works for both high and low nutrient systems as many claim to have success with both, as we all have. This assumes all else is the same (salinity changes, trace elements lacking, toxic chemicals etc)

Where the spectrum.
high nutrients or imbalanced ratio >zoas softies > LPS > SPS > good ratio and low nutrients.

Certainly there are always occasional exceptions but this has been my observation and aligns well with the tanks I’ve seen and my own. As well as everyone who claims they have had success high / low etc. lots of food / no fish etc.

and everyone is a Taylor swift fan, one way or another

I just do not agree with these assertions, that a ratio is in any way better than looking at the absolute values of N and P.

 

[Thales]

Or there’s something to be said about watching your chemistry. Haha

Hey Randy! If you expect I would reply, I must!

I chased a lot of numbers in a lot of tanks for a long time and had varying degrees of success. I watched a lot of people do the same. I watched a lot of people do a lot more work than I did, and some had more suceess and some had less, which led me to think that doing more to a tank doesn't mean that it will be 'better'. No matter what people do, it seems some corals do well in their system and some don't.

I think reef tanks are complex systems and that it can be really hard to pin down what does and doesn't make a difference in coral health, espically because we tend to try to lump all coarls into one bin.

One throughline to my reefing approach as been to 'stabilize' the system and then try to leave it alone as much as possibe. Sometimes that has led me to being overly lazy or the realities of life distracted me, which has led to some issues. However, when I keep up on most stuff, when I am paying attention so that whatever I have in place to keep the reef going is working and doing what it is supposed to - and when I am not changing chemistry or majorly tweaking anything at all in the system...when I let it all ride and do its thing, the corals seem to grow better, faster, and be more colorful.

I think flow is really important, and think it equally important that it changes intensity and style over the course of the day. This tends to help mix any dead spots, and gives the more sensitive corals a break from high flow.

I have also noticed that it sometimes seems to talk 3-8 months for my reefs to recover from something traumatic. Earlier this year I had some pathogen causing RTN, so I treated the tank, and only now does the display seem to be firing on all cylinders and the system seems robust. I was just gone for 3 weeks and the alk droped from around 9 to around 7 for 2 two of those weeks (and took a week to come back up after I got home) and none of the corals seemed to care, the sps are growing like mad.

I have also noticed that it takes some corals a long time to adapt to a particular system. Like 3-8 months or more. I think this may be responsible for some of the correlation/causation confusion we see in the hobby; if a coral has been doing poorly for a while, and the reefer changes something, it is very easy to say that change made the difference, when it really could just be the coral finally adapting.

I have seen no compelling evidence that low nutrients impact algae, and, given how algae live, I don't think that idea makes much sense at its core. I also don't see much compelling for the idea that you can grow algae in one part of the system to limit algae in another part of the system. I think herbivores, and manual removal/cropping are practical solutions to a lot of algal problems. I think most and dino and cyano issues burn themselves out, and that letting them do that stabilizes the system, and makes it more robust over time.

All that said, I have not tested Po4 and Nitrate since March (Po4 .62 & No3 35 which was up from the previous time I tested in October (Po4 34 No3 14). I keep thinking I should test, but it feels like make work, which I am trying to avoid at this point in my life. I don't do ICP often, and when I do test at home I usually use a Hach DR890, but I got some hanna checkers so I could more easily be on the same page of most of the hobby (though that might require me to actually do some testing).

In general, I think mixing testing methodologies will make you insane, so I say pick one and stick with it (and be realistic about the numbers because there is so much room for error and variability). I tried for a long time to compare methods of testing salinity (Milwaukee, Misco, Floating, Refracto, Conductivity, etc) and nearly went bonkers. Now use the apex conductivity probes in my system for trending, a veegee because it is fast for quick checks, and a Tropic Marin floating if I want to feel more precise (I should calibrate it but ugh). I like ICP every once and a while to check for anything obviously out of whack that could be killing my tank. I currently don't do biomics testing because I don't think there is much that is actionable in that realm yet. Again, kudos for folks that like to try to dig into those numbers.

In 2019 I plumbed the Secret Home Lab into the display system because volume impacts stability, and taking care of two systems was making me nuts. Yes, there are downsides to this but there are downsides to independent systems as well. In the Lab I have been growing coarls from embryos since 2020 (they are large now and I hope they will spawn this season) and I spawned A. mil last Nov/Dec and those babies are growing nicely. I am currently hoping for some gravid A. sar to arrive next week to spawn in early Nov (and hope for not a split spawn, so tiring!).

In the display (Mixed - LPS, SPS, NPS) some 'hard to keep sps' are doing fine and some are doing less fine. The pearl berry had AEFW, and seems to be perking up, and the Paletta Pink Tip is going gang busters. The Hawkins won't stop growing. I think that is all of the fancy names I remember.

So what is my point in regards to nutrients? I agree with you, there is no simple answer. I do know that I am much more interested in making my display beautiful to my eye, and playing with baby coral, than I am in tracking numbers and dosing lots of stuff. But that is me, and I fully appreciate folks that have the time and energy and money to mess around in that arena. I do think that a 'stable system' seems like it is very important in regards to long term care, and that whatever your philosophy around nutrients may be, keeping the system robustly stable seems important. I think a lot of available reefing methods produce good tanks, and help turn around bad tanks, not because of anything intrinsic to the method, but because they get people to pay attention to the system as a whole and help keep it stable.

Thanks for the push that helped me to summarize my current reefing philosophy, clearly I had this brewing in the back of my brain. Sorry if it is kind of off topic.

Here are two pics of my display I just took after being home from being gone for about 3 weeks. The right side had a major remodel yesterday, so sorry if it looks not grown in. Photographed under SKY lights, one set to photo mode at 50% brightness, and the other set to custom blues off, white and amber 100%shot on iPhone 13 with the Aquarium Cam app on auto. Beats me, I don’t see color well, so maybe they look like the tank actually looks. I am tired.

Ok, for fun (and becaue of something I can't talk about yet) I tested.


Po4
Hach Dr890 .77
Hanna .64

Nitrate
Hach DR890 1.4 (x4.42) = 6.19
Hanna 11.6

 

[Projects with Sam]

(some of the outliers in the graph are different test kits)
Still need to catch up on this thread but figured I'd post that I've some skin in the game for this conversation.
I got here dosing copious amounts of copepods and Phyto daily... running hot and just letting it run... Had some vacations and didn't setup the auto feeders quite right.
Not a lot of algae after Flux RX and Chemiclean rounds mid-last year I think. just a lot more Cyano now that I've stopped the pod/phyto dosing.
Just started dosing LC to get my Phosphate below 1. havent seen any improvements that aren't anecdotal. So hard to tell anything with all the variables...

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

I have heard the mentality of the ratio being nonsense. But I haven’t heard anyone say their tanks succeed outside that radio, yet. The ratio works for both high and low nutrient systems as many claim to have success with both, as we all have. This assumes all else is the same (salinity changes, trace elements lacking, toxic chemicals etc)

Thales post from just above shows a much lower ratio and is succeeding just fine.

 

[Hans-Werner]

@Hans-Werner

I am very sorry for my late reply after two weeks off. Super interesting read, thanks a lot for showing! I like all articles of Wiedenmann et al. very much, and I didn't know this one yet.

The methods part is especially interesting.

Replete nitrate
12 µM NO3 = 744 ppb NO3 = 0.74 ppm NO3
Limiting nitrate
0.7 µM NO3 = 43 ppb NO3 = 0.04 ppm NO3
Replete phosphate
3 µM PO4 = 285 ppb PO4 = 0.29 ppm PO4
Limiting phosphate
0.14 µM PO4 = 12 ppb PO4 = 0.01 ppm PO4

This article confirms what I told about nitrate as a nutrient and nitrate as an oxidant. Above 1 or 2 ppm the concentration of nitrate doesn't matter as a nutrient. Every nitrate related change you see above these concentrations is caused by the oxidant function of nitrate not by the nutrient function of nitrate. The oxidant function for example may keep iron oxidized and may influence the ratio of iron to copper and maybe some other transition metals.

This article focuses mainly on nitrogen and nitrate as a nutrient.

With the methods described they will not find most of the phosphate because it is neither in the host tissue nor in the zooxanthellae that were analyzed nor in the water. Most of the phosphate will end up in the coral skeletons, in contrast to nitrogen.

I find figure 2 d especially remarkable since it shows the high uptake (and need) of phosphate by Acropora which is typical in my experience for Acropora. Most of the phosphate taken up from the water by Acropora ends up in the skeleton.

For me the article is very understandable and I agree with most of the approaches and findings.

@ all: Lighting cannot be viewed independently of nutrients because the reactions of the corals to both are interconnected.

 

[Projects with Sam]

Go back and search for Richard Ross macna 2014. Its an interesting video to watch

Link for that video. Great watch!

 

[jda]

Interesting topic. My body certainly grows really well with elevated nutrients, why wouldn't my corals?

I imagine that you were being cheeky, but elevated nutrients damage your body and eventually kill it. Phosphorous, nitrates, sulphur all cause cell damage at high levels and then death if there is way too much. With sugars, diabetes comes first but can also just flat out kill you too. You need some and then your body works really hard to get rid of the rest... really hard.

I imagine that most folks know this, but your body has organs to get rid of the nutrients at poison levels (that diminishes over time), but most tanks do not have this same ability.

 

[Hooz]

I don't know how I haven't seen this thread yet! Still getting caught-up but it's very pertinent to an issue I'm having right now.

My nutrients were getting pretty "high" and, even though my coral looked good, I've started down a path to lowering them. Not suddenly, and not drastically, but lower than they were. I'm already dosing All for Reef, which does seem to have a limited carbon dosing effect, and helps to keep nitrates in check, but my starting numbers were hovering around 10-15ppm nitrate and .22ppm phosphates (as measured by Hanna Nitrate HR and Phosphate ULR checkers).

It had been months since I did a water change, so I started with a 25% water change with TM Syn-Biotic salt, then a week later I did another 10% change with the same salt. 4 days after the second water change, my nitrate was at 1.6ppm and phosphate was at .16ppm. My gonis, micromussa and blastos all look fine, but my torches, hammers, frogs/octos and zoas look unhappy. So I dosed (Brightwell NeoNitro) my nitrates up to 5ppm (yesterday), but left for work this morning before the lights came on, so we'll see if anything is responding or not when I get home.

I know quite some time ago, in another thread, @Hans-Werner mentioned that once coral get acclimated to "high nutrients", they have a hard time adjusting to lower nutrients. What I'm wondering is if there is a threshold. If you keep stuff in .20ppm phosphates, will they never again be happy in anything less than .20ppm, or is .15ppm still "high enough" for them to adjust?

This stuff fascinates and frustrates me at the same time!

 

[Thales]

Link for that video. Great watch!

Hehe. Thanks! I haven't watched that in a while and I am home sick so I let it run.

I do love that when I suggested people might be dosing phoshate in the future that it got a big laugh!

 

[Miami Reef]

Hehe. Thanks! I haven't watched that in a while and I am home sick so I let it run.

I do love that when I suggested people might be dosing phoshate in the future that it got a big laugh!

People thought it was a crazy thought to entertain. I love the foreshadowing.

I saw your baby corals in a youtube video. Awesome work!

 

[jason2459]

I imagine that you were being cheeky, but elevated nutrients damage your body and eventually kill it. Phosphorous, nitrates, sulphur all cause cell damage at high levels and then death if there is way too much. With sugars, diabetes comes first but can also just flat out kill you too. You need some and then your body works really hard to get rid of the rest... really hard.

I imagine that most folks know this, but your body has organs to get rid of the nutrients at poison levels (that diminishes over time), but most tanks do not have this same ability.

Partially cheeky and partially serious and stand by both opinions.

 

[Hans-Werner]

I know quite some time ago, in another thread, @Hans-Werner mentioned that once coral get acclimated to "high nutrients", they have a hard time adjusting to lower nutrients. What I'm wondering is if there is a threshold. If you keep stuff in .20ppm phosphates, will they never again be happy in anything less than .20ppm, or is .15ppm still "high enough" for them to adjust?

Yes, corals adapt specifically to high phosphate concentrations and may have difficulties to adapt to lower concentrations, especially Acropora.

If there is a threshold I would think it is around 0.1 ppm. I would expect that lowering phosphate by half from 0.4 to 0.2 ppm is not as problematic as lowering it from 0.1 ppm to 0.05 ppm.

What might also be the case is that it is only an adaptation process and after a few days the corals open up again.

 

[Reefkeepers Archive]

Elevated nutrients are one of the most talked about issues in reefkeeping, with folks on all sides of the issue.

There is, however, no simple answer to the title question (IMO).

I thought I'd start a thread for a wide ranging discussion of this issue, and to gather many of the bits of data and anecdotes and comments in one place.

I'll start off with a few ideas to provide some background and ideas to debate.

1. It is clear that there are great reef tanks that most hobbyists admire with nutrients (nitrate and phosphate, particularly) ranging from low levels (say, less than 2 ppm nitrate and 0.01 ppm phosphate) up to quite high levels (>1 ppm phosphate and >100 ppm nitrate).

2. It is clear that there are reef tanks overrun with bryopsis, valonia, green hair algae, caulerpa, dinos, cyano, or other problems at nearly any of the values mentioned in 1.

3. Scientific studies on the effects of elevated nutrients on growth of hard corals are mixed. In some studies they thrive. In some studies they do not. In some studies, some growth forms (e.g., encrusting) are decreased and others (e.g., linear growth) of the same coral are increased. In most study cases, these are not getting the natural particulate foods they would get in the wild, and how much of what particulate foods they get in aquaria likely varies greatly based on husbandry techniques used.

4. Scientific studies on elevated nutrients in the ocean often suggest that hard corals decline and other organisms take over. This result is, of course, not due to solely to effects of nutrients on corals, but to effects on competing organisms as well.

Since a reef aquarium is, in some ways, a small microcosm of the real ocean, I think point 4 should not be dismissed, even knowing that point 1 is valid.

Perhaps point 1 is only valid for elevated nutrients if there are other aspects of the aquarium that allow hard corals to thrive. For example, herbivores to control algae.

Here, for example, is a recent analysis relating to hard corals in the ocean with elevated nutrients:

A new perspective of nutrient management of subtropical coastal stress-tolerant scleractinian coral communities

A new perspective of nutrient management of subtropical coastal stress-tolerant scleractinian coral communities

Elevated nutrients decrease the healthy status of coral communities, which can be stressful on reef corals, always resulting in decreased live sclerac…

www.sciencedirect.com

from it:

Elevated nutrients decrease the healthy status of coral communities, which can be stressful on reef corals, always resulting in decreased live scleractinian coral cover (LSCC).

I keep my phosphates at 0.00. Hanna checker can't even detect it. And nitrates at 5ppm, I've found favia,leptastrea,favites absolutely hate phosphate, the rest of my corals also enjoy the low levels