I buffer my fresh saltwater bucket with rapidly depleting trace elements. I do AWCs throughout the week from the bucket.
On the one hand I agree, and so does the chemical data from my system - water changes are not trace element dosing - except for a very small handful of elements, the trace input is essentially nothing. In my case more elements were diluted lower by water changes than added.
Why not try something like All For Reef for a month and collect data? Everyone seems to use it and I am not convinced it worked for me while I did. I switched back to three-part after that episode. If anything, I got dinos when I used it (probably unrelated but the carbon dosing component on it help bottom out my nutrients).A couple of updates on how the experiment will progress.
I wasn't sure what I'd do for phase 4
I've opted for a more detailed element management for phase 4. This will follow phase 3 where the Red sea trace mix is added, to see if managing more traces individually has any detectable advantages.
I'll cross reference Randy's list of possibly worthwhile elements with what ICP-MS says about my water and what Moonshiners says target levels / input rates should be for the ppb level trace elements. I'll use the captiv8 single element minor and trace pack. The missing ones I'll use other sources.
This will be the list of elements managed...
After that, I'll have a phase 5: "do nothing - again" where I go back to maintaining the tank with minimal trace inputs, and see if whatever benefits were seemingly observed during the interventions would be observed to decrease.
I'm new here. How can I subscribe to this ?
So the video is nice - for those wondering what's in it, it's like 80% a discussion of these articles below.
Almost completely irrelevant to your situation but the saying came to mind when I read your post, ”a day in the library can be worth a week in the lab”.Updates on this.
Here's how I should have measured coral fluorescence - and how I would recommend any interested in trying to quantify coral color comparisons to do it. I would have if I had read this paper a little more carefully earlier.
Blue light regulation of host pigment in reef-building corals, D'Angelo et al.
See pg 5 - here's a tiny snippet.
Use fixed color LED lighting in the same position, put a good filter over the camera and shoot the photos on all manual identical settings. Use Blue LEDs to drive green fluorescence, and green LEDs to look for red/orange fluorescent pigments. compare identical camera setting pictures over time.
Advantages over my pigment extraction: Faster, easier, non-destructive, less equipment, can visualize the entire colony, fine for corals that would be hard to sample, more obviously relevant to appearance than a pigment extraction....
a couple of example shots from my tank 3 weeks apart (showing no obvious differences - just an illustration of method)
You can see that corals without fluorescent pigments (gorgonians in the foreground) show up nearly totally dark....
I'll be adding this method to what I'm already doing going forward.
just as observation, the growth rate has seemed to ramp up in the later phases of the experiment.
As you near the end of this study, are you thinking there should be a “2.0” version of the study utilizing what you learned in this study? Or are you ready to move on? I was thinking a study of 16 nubbins in separate containers from the same species would remove variability seen in an aquarium study.So here is the coral color data from Phase 3 - Red Sea Trace Part A & C
The sinularia shows no color improvements to the eyeball or to the camera over phases 0,1,2, and 3.
The sarcophyton seems photographically to have possibly increased in green brightness during phase 3
Next are the orange monti cap and green pocillopora, these also seemed to show noticeable differences to the eye, camera or both.
The photographs might indicate more intense orange, and to the eyeball the orange seems more intense as well. (we could also make an observation here about the relative growth rate during phase 3 vs previous.)
and here's the pocillopora....
While I didn't notice any color increase by eyeball in normal conditions like this, the photograph looks like more intense green is possible. (again, we could note growth rate differences).
A comment and apology for the light fields in phases 2 and 3 looking different than 0 and 1. I chose at the beginning of the experiment to photograph in "full light" which means all my lights on and the window blinds open as I always have them. The window blinds open introduced more or less ambient sunlight during some photo sessions than others. That uncontrolled variable was a poor choice.
Fortunately we have some unambiguous observations...
Photos with the polyps retracted reveal the amount of green in the pocillopora skin...
I did not photograph this aspect of color routinely, because it simply wasn't present early in the experiment so I didn't know to monitor it - it was a dramatic increase that became very apparent during phase 3, but if you inspect the phase 0 picture closely, you'll see the slightest blush of green skin present there as well - just far far less.
Here's the monti digitata - very noticeable eyeball change in the increase in green coloration both on polyps (a green sheen) and skin on several spots indicated by arrows...
Here's another shot with polyps retracted in normal light to better illustrate...
While the green skin at the locations of new growth might make us wonder if growth rate is really the controlling variable, in the earlier phases there were lots of regions of new growth that had no green skin whatsoever.
here's blue LED+yellow filter images to track the spread of the green skin pigment...
And here's a bonus coral. During phase 0, I acquired a green monti cap frag.
It lost coloration in my system over a month in my system and became almost entirely brown. Then during phase 3 it regained green coloration. The frag is small and far from the glass and difficult to photograph but the color changes are still observable.
(first 3 pictures are not always under the same photo/lighting settings, but the last 3 pictures are)
Phase 2 pigment extraction data
(this will be shared later, but it's not as clear as the photographs, bummer.)
Commentary on Phase 3:
The Red Sea Trace A (Iodine, F, Br) added easily trackable Iodine - no increase in F or Br was measured, and Part C (Iron, Cr, Mn, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, and Al) added easily measurable Fe, Cr, Co, Ni, Zn, and perhaps Al - no increase in Mn, Cu. The increase in green fluorescence and orange in the monti cap was clearly observed across multiple corals. Anecdotally, 4 weeks into the 6 week trace dosing, two people who are not hobbyists but pass by the tank regularly - unprompted - told me that the tank looked "brighter" and asked me if I changed the lights (there were no light changes). During this time, nutrients and major parameters were held essentially constant. This along with the fact that the obvious color increases were not observed during the earlier interventions (algae/phyto input and heavy water changes) adds more confidence that the trace supplementation was the driver. I have guesses but I do not have good theories on which elements were the drivers of these color changes. My overall impression of the appearance of the tank and coral color after phase 3 is that if the corals had looked like this at the beginning, I would not have conducted this experiment. The colors are visually bright and there are no corals that lack the basic primary colors they should have.
Caveats:
1. Some of the colors that were lacking are the absolute most basic ones (green in green monti cap and the monti digi). This indicates that my tank conditions were possibly well out of the normal hobby range for such common corals to lose their most basic colors. In that sense, my results may not be applicable to very many systems.
2. Now (in the future) 6+ weeks after stopping trace dosing at the end of Phase 3, the coral color continued to increase and has shown no signs of reverting. I previously staked out my position that I need to see colors fade after trace dosing was ended in order to be very confident in the effect. So that piece of evidence is a long time coming and still waiting. So for the moment, although I am persuaded that the trace dosing was effective I am currently in the camp "I stopped Trace dosing and nothing changed." We'll see how long that remains the case.
