Do we really need all those traces? Do we really need to keep water with the exact elementos of the ocean?

HB AL

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Not sure how much it matters but if I could keep every parameter of my water to match exactly the water and everything it contains flowing over the Great Barrier Reef then it would be a no brainer to replicate that in our glass cages.
 

X-37B

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I maintained the big 3 with the standard 10% a week wc for years.
It works very well indeed.
Big 3, temp, sg, was all I really needed to check and corals grew well.
I wanted a no scheduled water change system for my new 120.
I looked at all forms of dosing and decided to run a modified DSR system.
I run a carx with manmade media for alk and ca.
I dose by hand currently 6ml of ez-trace daily. Started with 3.
I test mag and k and the ez-trace keeps them in range.
I test for strontium and I dose strontium
weekly to keep it at 8-10.
I run close to NSW levels for the big 3.
Alk 7-7.5
Ca 420-450
Mag 1300-1350
K 400
Ez trace has:
Magnesium
Potasium
Sulphate
Boron
Iodine
Manganese
Are the 4 others needed?
I dont know but its simple to run and is a proven system, imo.
I can test for iodine and its in range too.
I also dose 5ml of ez carbon to feed the corals and bacteria by hand daily.
5ml is a very small amount and keeps po4 at .02-.06
No3 5-10
It is a blend of vinegar, sugar, and iron.

I have done 2 10%, around 12 gal, water changes since startup 1.5 years ago.

I am going to do 10% every 6 months now just to remove any buildup of possible unwanted matter.

Skimmer water gets replaced with 250ml of new salt water twice a week also.

14 fish that I feed and they feed the corals.
A couple squirts of ocean feast every few weeks when I remember too.

1 cup of carbon every month in a small reactor.

I am going to run an icp test after the 1st of the year just to see levels after 1.5 years of running.

It takes me a total of not even 5 minutes to hand dose and check alk daily.

For me I chose the DSR method but use a carx.
I am running it because I wanted to see if it could be done after reading about it online.

I can always go back to the standard wc method and when I setup a planned large upgrade may run a 1% continuos wc system.

But so far I am really liking the results im getting.

A little off subject but trying to manage a large amount of trace elements is most likely not needed, imo.
 

Brett S

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Here are my thoughts on this. Right now there is a whole lot about this that people don’t know. But what we do know is that organisms in general do better with a variety of nutrients and minerals and trace elements and such.

A human could survive on bread and water, but that wouldn’t make for a very robust and healthy human. I think the thought is that corals can also survive on the bare minimum. However, if we can provide all of the nutrients and trace elements that they need then they will thrive instead of just survive.

The problem is that no one really knows exactly which nutrients and trace elements corals need. All we know is that corals live in the ocean and we can determine which elements are in the ocean and how much of each element there is. So by trying to match what’s in the ocean we are matching the coral’s natural environment - where they do thirve - then we are more likely to be providing the corals with what they need.

So while we don’t necessarily know which specific elements corals need we do know that they do better with trace elements. And people are continuing to do research to try to determine which elements are more beneficial. I think in another 5 or 10 years we’ll have a much better idea of exactly what is needed. But for now all we can do is try to match the ocean because we know that the corals are using the elements that are in the ocean.

After all that, I think the answer is that yes, you can grow corals with just calcium and alkalinity, but just like a human surviving on bread alone they probably won’t be as healthy as they would be if you provided all of the elements that they need.
 
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anthonygf

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I have been reefing for 25 years and I have been in the hobby for 35 years. First off the old days were laughable. There was a center of innovation in the U.S. That center was LA. Germany had solid innovation, but they may as well have been on Mars for what it mattered to 99% of hobbiests. Sorry, there were other places that had solid people that had made head way in their particular areas but there was no internet, there was no easy transfer of knowlege, good or bad. Those that have come to this hobby within the last 10 years take this fact for granted. I just want to put that out there, because I see way too many people thinking that the old days had it better ... 100% they didn't. We have terrible surviorship bias when it comes to this. Remember it is only the dedicated that are here today to tell the tale.

When I first started out in reef keeping there were and are the same manufactures producing the same tests, with one exception ... Hanna. Hilariously, none of their quality has changed. There were the same now as they were then. The advent of automated testing is very very new, and the actual availability of lab testing to hobbyists is really new. In 1995 measuring the sodium or rubidium or even the potassium of my tank was akin to me flying to the moon for a vacation. We water changed. When in doubt water change it out. Closed systems where mythical beasts akin to the Loch Ness monster. Nobody talked or thought about it because why? There was no way to even know if you dosed something that it was even near seawater much less that your tank was even consuming it. Sure Universities may have had the equipment to test but even then it was only the specialized areas in large Universities with matching budgets that could even dream of this. Now I can pay $40 and ICP will tell me dang near everything that I want to know and as others have done on this board, you can even coerce them into testing for crazy things like Rubidium. I think I have made my point. We are just now even able to see the parameters much less chase them. You see these old solid systems with the few aquarists that have made it through the years. They built their successful systems on trail and error. Not on feedback from testing.

To your particular question about trace elements. Here is the problem ... when we were in school we "learned" the base principal of something. Then we advanced in grades and built on this base principle. Always moving forward they said. The problem is that we never really got the base principle. I see it in everything. Nobody wants to do the dumb old boring thing that all of the disgusting noobs do. They want to get to the kewl thing that they can show off to their friends. Sadly because they didn't truly understand the principles they were working with they fail when the advanced idea required them to have an advanced understanding of the dumb ole noob stuff. In learning Spanish my teacher said learn to pronounce the vowels. Do it until you can do it in your sleep. I have. My Spanish is not gringo Spanish, because I concentrated on the basics. It is amazing how the basics permeate all of the upper levels of understanding. Ok, tea ... china ... what's the point. Very few in this hobby can master the basics. Let me re-iterate. Very few can master the basics. Why? Because the basics aren't kewl. You can't show off to your friends. You can't tell everyone how smart you are. When I started I started with a Niger Trigger in a 10 gallon tank with an undergravel filter and Penn Plax hood and airstones. You have to go through all of the steps and learn each step to get to the next. We believe that we can skip past these dumb old processes because ... interwebz. We can not and we fail.

So what does this all mean. First Salt water is a small hobby, Fish only is the the vast majority of that hobby. Coral is a specialty and stony corals are a smaller part of that specialty, it goes down from there but I want to stop here because at this point my guesstimate is that we are at 5% of a very small hobby. Yikes. There are many that try to grow coral and many that start in the hobby and see how hard it is to grow these coral and think, I can do that those other people they aren't as smart as me, I will succeed where they have failed. I don't think I need to elaborate from there. The reason I point this out is because there is a lot of debate even among those that can carry all of this out. Also there is a huge scientist hobbiest divide. This exacerbates already contentious subjects. This is the bleeding bleeding edge of this hobby. The problem is that many people see these debates (because now they can) and they think this sounds like it can solve the problem that I am having with my aquarium and they pull the debate out of context and try to use it. I am actually an AnCap so I am accept this as neccessary and important, but for many this is confusing and it creates a cacophony of hopeless disinformation. The only good thing I can say about the old days is that it wasn't easy to publish a book, so if a book was published at least something to bring to the table. Now anyone can say anything on any forum and there will be no vetting process whatsoever (as I believe it should be). This however brings it's own problems.

My personal view of trace elements is this. You must be able to properly mineralize your tank before you can even fathom or contemplate working with trace elements to even determine their efficacy. There are few IMO on this board that I think would be capable. I am not one of them. I am still trying to get the big three down. But as I start to refine my process I can see those that want to take it beyond where I am just starting to arrive because they have been here for years. It is a refinement. If you have looked to provide a razor sharp edge to a knife, you know that you can't start with the finest grit possible and get anywhere. You have to go through the various grits each time making the blade sharper and sharper. Plenty of new and novice people will talk about things that are refinement process and they will try to apply them to the current problems that they are solving. Maybe one in a million will do something interesting or new, or more likely they will just fail and have to fall back to the actual boring old methods that have worked in the past to solve their current problems. But who wants to do something as dumb as that.

My 2 cents.
More like 200 cents. :)
 

cryptodendrum

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I have been reefing for 25 years and I have been in the hobby for 35 years. First off the old days were laughable. There was a center of innovation in the U.S. That center was LA. Germany had solid innovation, but they may as well have been on Mars for what it mattered to 99% of hobbiests. Sorry, there were other places that had solid people that had made head way in their particular areas but there was no internet, there was no easy transfer of knowlege, good or bad. Those that have come to this hobby within the last 10 years take this fact for granted. I just want to put that out there, because I see way too many people thinking that the old days had it better ... 100% they didn't. We have terrible surviorship bias when it comes to this. Remember it is only the dedicated that are here today to tell the tale.

When I first started out in reef keeping there were and are the same manufactures producing the same tests, with one exception ... Hanna. Hilariously, none of their quality has changed. There were the same now as they were then. The advent of automated testing is very very new, and the actual availability of lab testing to hobbyists is really new. In 1995 measuring the sodium or rubidium or even the potassium of my tank was akin to me flying to the moon for a vacation. We water changed. When in doubt water change it out. Closed systems where mythical beasts akin to the Loch Ness monster. Nobody talked or thought about it because why? There was no way to even know if you dosed something that it was even near seawater much less that your tank was even consuming it. Sure Universities may have had the equipment to test but even then it was only the specialized areas in large Universities with matching budgets that could even dream of this. Now I can pay $40 and ICP will tell me dang near everything that I want to know and as others have done on this board, you can even coerce them into testing for crazy things like Rubidium. I think I have made my point. We are just now even able to see the parameters much less chase them. You see these old solid systems with the few aquarists that have made it through the years. They built their successful systems on trail and error. Not on feedback from testing.

To your particular question about trace elements. Here is the problem ... when we were in school we "learned" the base principal of something. Then we advanced in grades and built on this base principle. Always moving forward they said. The problem is that we never really got the base principle. I see it in everything. Nobody wants to do the dumb old boring thing that all of the disgusting noobs do. They want to get to the kewl thing that they can show off to their friends. Sadly because they didn't truly understand the principles they were working with they fail when the advanced idea required them to have an advanced understanding of the dumb ole noob stuff. In learning Spanish my teacher said learn to pronounce the vowels. Do it until you can do it in your sleep. I have. My Spanish is not gringo Spanish, because I concentrated on the basics. It is amazing how the basics permeate all of the upper levels of understanding. Ok, tea ... china ... what's the point. Very few in this hobby can master the basics. Let me re-iterate. Very few can master the basics. Why? Because the basics aren't kewl. You can't show off to your friends. You can't tell everyone how smart you are. When I started I started with a Niger Trigger in a 10 gallon tank with an undergravel filter and Penn Plax hood and airstones. You have to go through all of the steps and learn each step to get to the next. We believe that we can skip past these dumb old processes because ... interwebz. We can not and we fail.

So what does this all mean. First Salt water is a small hobby, Fish only is the the vast majority of that hobby. Coral is a specialty and stony corals are a smaller part of that specialty, it goes down from there but I want to stop here because at this point my guesstimate is that we are at 5% of a very small hobby. Yikes. There are many that try to grow coral and many that start in the hobby and see how hard it is to grow these coral and think, I can do that those other people they aren't as smart as me, I will succeed where they have failed. I don't think I need to elaborate from there. The reason I point this out is because there is a lot of debate even among those that can carry all of this out. Also there is a huge scientist hobbiest divide. This exacerbates already contentious subjects. This is the bleeding bleeding edge of this hobby. The problem is that many people see these debates (because now they can) and they think this sounds like it can solve the problem that I am having with my aquarium and they pull the debate out of context and try to use it. I am actually an AnCap so I am accept this as neccessary and important, but for many this is confusing and it creates a cacophony of hopeless disinformation. The only good thing I can say about the old days is that it wasn't easy to publish a book, so if a book was published at least something to bring to the table. Now anyone can say anything on any forum and there will be no vetting process whatsoever (as I believe it should be). This however brings it's own problems.

My personal view of trace elements is this. You must be able to properly mineralize your tank before you can even fathom or contemplate working with trace elements to even determine their efficacy. There are few IMO on this board that I think would be capable. I am not one of them. I am still trying to get the big three down. But as I start to refine my process I can see those that want to take it beyond where I am just starting to arrive because they have been here for years. It is a refinement. If you have looked to provide a razor sharp edge to a knife, you know that you can't start with the finest grit possible and get anywhere. You have to go through the various grits each time making the blade sharper and sharper. Plenty of new and novice people will talk about things that are refinement process and they will try to apply them to the current problems that they are solving. Maybe one in a million will do something interesting or new, or more likely they will just fail and have to fall back to the actual boring old methods that have worked in the past to solve their current problems. But who wants to do something as dumb as that.

My 2 cents.

You just spoke to my very old soul, @HuduVudu, as I can relate 100%.

I started reefing in 1991 under slightly unusual circumstances; in fact this month is the 30 year anniversary of my reefing hobby, which I've maintained across two continents. The previous year (1990) I'd been recruited out of University to become a coder / developer in the financial world. I was a product of the 1980's BBS / hacker generation, and at the time, it seemed like the dream job I somehow never expected to get; I wrote my first BASIC program at the age of 10, but never had any formal academic training in high school / University because most of the curriculum was based on how to use WordStar 3.3 and other programs, which was well beneath my skill level. In 1991, I got promoted, a raise and my own dedicated office, which I was told I could decorate however I wanted (within reason). And for some crazy reason (I blame James Bond movies) I thought it would be awesome to have a marine aquarium with lion fish in my office, so I bought a 55G Oceananic and proceeded to set it up. From there, I quickly moved into corals.

Funny enough, I was just 3 hours away from you in San Antonio back then (I guess, seeing you're in Houston).

But your (mostly) right; the Internet didn't exist like we know it today. Sure, you could jump on a BBS with a Fidonet gateway, but it did not contain this reserve of Reefing / Marine aquarium information it contains today; and for the average reefer back then, this type of Internet access probably seemed more cryptographic than our aquariums anyways.

That pretty much left most of America with two sources of Reefing information: Books and our local aquarium stores. For the later, I'd visited just about every aquarium store in San Antonio trying to find out who the real experts and sources of knowledge and had deduced that down to just two guys. A guy named Heath that worked in a large Pet & Aquarium store in North Star Mall, and another guy named Bill who worked at an exotic pet & aquarium store in Castle Hills - and befriended them both as my allies and sources of knowledge.

As far as books went, it seemed to me at the time, the most authoritative books on the subject back then were coming mostly out of Germany and the Netherlands, but I didn't read German or Dutch (yet) but even if those books were accessible to me, they would have been pretty useless. California was the other alternative source of knowledge, and I managed to find one book on the topic (the best I could find - the other few seemed skinny on details) that was co-written by Julian Sprung in the 80's. I'd already seen Sprung's name in aquarist magazine articles, so I quickly latched onto him as another authoritative source of info.

And that was about it for authoritative sources of information - Sprung and my two new friends, Heath and Bill. And to top that off, Heath and Bill saw each other sort of as competitors - so I couldn't mix those friendships. But I found both their advice and expertise invaluable over those first couple of years. Through them I learned that I'd probably should not have bought a Wet/Dry filtration system, and the HOB Wet/Dry filter I'd bought before I met either of them, was pretty much a joke. Heath sold me a Sander Protein Skimmer & added a Deep Sand Bed, embracing the Berlin method of filtration they had both sold me on.

Flash forward to the start of 1993 - I happened to meet a CEO of a European tech company headquartered out of the Netherlands as he was attending the same vendor hosted conference I was at; and 3 hours of discussions later, he was offering me a job in their German software development offices. Without hesitation, I accepted on the spot and we agreed to spend the next few months sorting out the details (via telephone, Fax and postal mail). Those 3 months stretched out to 5 months, but preparations for my relocation continued.

The funny thing was, back then, with so little known about the hobby - but yet at the same time, everyone in my current employer had learned a little bit about reef keeping - particularly that the real expertise in our hobby was centered in Germany & the Netherlands - I was telling all my friends and office colleagues "I'm going over there to learn more about the Reef Keeping hobby; in my spare time I'll do software coding / development work." :D

And sure enough, from my perspective, there was a lot more support / experienced peeps in Marine / Reef keeping in just the Netherlands than I'd seen back in Texas. Of course, I had to start all over making contacts in the industry, which this time had the the further handicap that most in the hobby looked at me a little bit like an odd-duck being a foreigner. I think they thought I'd only be here for an assignment for maybe 1-2 years and didn't take me so serious, at first; it took a couple of more years before they saw I was on my way to becoming a serious player in Reefing.

The availability of online information started to change around 2000, and I think I jumped on ReefCentral with this same nick around 2002 or 2003, and it's kind of gotten better, but it's also had it's downsides; for instance the number of beginners evangelising garlic as a cure for Ich, and other myths was kind of becoming overwhelming already.

The funny thing is, in just a few short years, I'd see the very same thing in my own career path. In 1996, I was hired for my first job which specified Computer and Network Security as a primary job description (we didn't yet call it CyberSecurity back then) - once again, like my Reefing hobby, I was ahead of the curve in my profession. It would be another 10+ years before CyberSecurity would be coined as a label, leading hundreds of new recruits into my profession, each with their own ideas and myths what their job would really entail. So many did not do the basic education and did not want to go back to learn the history of hacking, software vulnerabilities and attack exploitation. They knew nothing about the days (80's and 90's) of poking around on BBSes, Fidonet, X.25 networks or even the Internet, could end up getting you raided by the Secret Service or FBI, and/or have some over-eager prosecutor who would equate teenage curiosity and exploration online with that of espionage or worse. So many of the new recruits to my profession want the same thing as many newbie reefers - the status of showing off something to impress their friends and family - without really doing a lot of the underlying work and education.

In fact, over the years, I've noticed many similarities between Reefing and CyberSecurity, including:
- Validate and Sanity check all inputs
- Quarantine, quarantine, quarantine
- You can't control what you don't monitor and test for
- Good things take lots of time, bad things happen much, much, much faster
- What your backend infrastructure physically looks like doesn't matter, what matters is how it performs reliably
- All Infrastructure components should FAIL SAFELY and FAIL SECURELY by Design
- Simulate and practice and test your safety / security controls
- Disaster recovery and Biz/Aquarium Continuity is largely about having an effective and flexible plan that can accommodate known and unknown scenarios
- Perform and maintain offsite backups (yeah, you can do this with corals with fellow reefers)
- and more.

Sorry for this slight digression from the OP - but just wanted to echo what you said about how this hobby has changed over the years in regards to information available and practices. Because I agree you are correct; so many of the newbies in the last 10 to 20 years often make the mistake that the hobby has always been this way, the way it is today; when in reality it was in many ways, very different in the 1990's.
 

Scdell

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I have been reefing for 25 years and I have been in the hobby for 35 years. First off the old days were laughable. There was a center of innovation in the U.S. That center was LA. Germany had solid innovation, but they may as well have been on Mars for what it mattered to 99% of hobbiests. Sorry, there were other places that had solid people that had made head way in their particular areas but there was no internet, there was no easy transfer of knowlege, good or bad. Those that have come to this hobby within the last 10 years take this fact for granted. I just want to put that out there, because I see way too many people thinking that the old days had it better ... 100% they didn't. We have terrible surviorship bias when it comes to this. Remember it is only the dedicated that are here today to tell the tale.

When I first started out in reef keeping there were and are the same manufactures producing the same tests, with one exception ... Hanna. Hilariously, none of their quality has changed. There were the same now as they were then. The advent of automated testing is very very new, and the actual availability of lab testing to hobbyists is really new. In 1995 measuring the sodium or rubidium or even the potassium of my tank was akin to me flying to the moon for a vacation. We water changed. When in doubt water change it out. Closed systems where mythical beasts akin to the Loch Ness monster. Nobody talked or thought about it because why? There was no way to even know if you dosed something that it was even near seawater much less that your tank was even consuming it. Sure Universities may have had the equipment to test but even then it was only the specialized areas in large Universities with matching budgets that could even dream of this. Now I can pay $40 and ICP will tell me dang near everything that I want to know and as others have done on this board, you can even coerce them into testing for crazy things like Rubidium. I think I have made my point. We are just now even able to see the parameters much less chase them. You see these old solid systems with the few aquarists that have made it through the years. They built their successful systems on trail and error. Not on feedback from testing.

To your particular question about trace elements. Here is the problem ... when we were in school we "learned" the base principal of something. Then we advanced in grades and built on this base principle. Always moving forward they said. The problem is that we never really got the base principle. I see it in everything. Nobody wants to do the dumb old boring thing that all of the disgusting noobs do. They want to get to the kewl thing that they can show off to their friends. Sadly because they didn't truly understand the principles they were working with they fail when the advanced idea required them to have an advanced understanding of the dumb ole noob stuff. In learning Spanish my teacher said learn to pronounce the vowels. Do it until you can do it in your sleep. I have. My Spanish is not gringo Spanish, because I concentrated on the basics. It is amazing how the basics permeate all of the upper levels of understanding. Ok, tea ... china ... what's the point. Very few in this hobby can master the basics. Let me re-iterate. Very few can master the basics. Why? Because the basics aren't kewl. You can't show off to your friends. You can't tell everyone how smart you are. When I started I started with a Niger Trigger in a 10 gallon tank with an undergravel filter and Penn Plax hood and airstones. You have to go through all of the steps and learn each step to get to the next. We believe that we can skip past these dumb old processes because ... interwebz. We can not and we fail.

So what does this all mean. First Salt water is a small hobby, Fish only is the the vast majority of that hobby. Coral is a specialty and stony corals are a smaller part of that specialty, it goes down from there but I want to stop here because at this point my guesstimate is that we are at 5% of a very small hobby. Yikes. There are many that try to grow coral and many that start in the hobby and see how hard it is to grow these coral and think, I can do that those other people they aren't as smart as me, I will succeed where they have failed. I don't think I need to elaborate from there. The reason I point this out is because there is a lot of debate even among those that can carry all of this out. Also there is a huge scientist hobbiest divide. This exacerbates already contentious subjects. This is the bleeding bleeding edge of this hobby. The problem is that many people see these debates (because now they can) and they think this sounds like it can solve the problem that I am having with my aquarium and they pull the debate out of context and try to use it. I am actually an AnCap so I am accept this as neccessary and important, but for many this is confusing and it creates a cacophony of hopeless disinformation. The only good thing I can say about the old days is that it wasn't easy to publish a book, so if a book was published at least something to bring to the table. Now anyone can say anything on any forum and there will be no vetting process whatsoever (as I believe it should be). This however brings it's own problems.

My personal view of trace elements is this. You must be able to properly mineralize your tank before you can even fathom or contemplate working with trace elements to even determine their efficacy. There are few IMO on this board that I think would be capable. I am not one of them. I am still trying to get the big three down. But as I start to refine my process I can see those that want to take it beyond where I am just starting to arrive because they have been here for years. It is a refinement. If you have looked to provide a razor sharp edge to a knife, you know that you can't start with the finest grit possible and get anywhere. You have to go through the various grits each time making the blade sharper and sharper. Plenty of new and novice people will talk about things that are refinement process and they will try to apply them to the current problems that they are solving. Maybe one in a million will do something interesting or new, or more likely they will just fail and have to fall back to the actual boring old methods that have worked in the past to solve their current problems. But who wants to do something as dumb as that.

My 2 cents.
Well said. There aren't too many here that are in tune with their tank. Or willing to put the time in to learn. I read one thread where there was a lot of detail into something, videos and such explaining it all. One person asked if the OP could summarize it all because he didn't have the time to go through everything. This is the state of our hobby now.
 
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