Dosing Lithium for bryopsis

[JWsticks]

There is a recent YouTube video from Triton stating increasing lithium to 1ppm would help tackle bryopsis. Does this impact SPS or algae in a refugium?

 

[mcarroll]

There is a recent YouTube video from Triton stating increasing lithium to 1ppm would help tackle bryopsis. Does this impact SPS or algae in a refugium?

AFAIK this is regurgitating speculating that used to surround Kent's Magnesium supplement.

Going from memory....it was the only thing that used to kill bryopsis and folks presumed for a long time that it was just elevated magnesium (1500ppm!) that was doing it.....then folks noticed no other Mg supplements worked the same.....then folks noticed there were import restrictions vs bringing the Kent product into Europe....then folks presumed from some clue I don't recall that the product had Lithium in it for some reason....then Kent reformulated the supplement (so they could export?) and it stopped working for "alt" purposes.

I don't remember this going beyond speculation though...never heard of anyone dosing lithium to test it.

Googling to find if anyone did test lithium wouldn't be hard if you're curious.

 

[JWsticks]

There is a recent YouTube video from Triton stating increasing lithium to 1ppm would help tackle bryopsis. Does this impact SPS or algae in a refugium?

AFAIK this is regurgitating speculating that used to surround Kent's Magnesium supplement.

Going from memory....it was the only thing that used to kill bryopsis and folks presumed for a long time that it was just elevated magnesium (1500ppm!) that was doing it.....then folks noticed no other Mg supplements worked the same.....then folks noticed there were import restrictions vs bringing the Kent product into Europe....then folks presumed from some clue I don't recall that the product had Lithium in it for some reason....then Kent reformulated the supplement (so they could export?) and it stopped working for "alt" purposes.

I don't remember this going beyond speculation though...never heard of anyone dosing lithium to test it.

Googling to find if anyone did test lithium wouldn't be hard if you're curious.

I bought an abalone yesterday to help with the bryopsis battle. It seems MAG flake used previously by reefers also had high lithium levels as an impurity.

Furthermore, 1ppm of lithium seems to have minimal impact to corals from what I've gathered so far from Google. I'll get some lithium chloride on hand in the case it is required.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

I’ve not seen evidence of the lithium/bryopsis connection to speculate on it.

 

[mcarroll]

I bought an abalone yesterday to help with the bryopsis battle. It seems MAG flake used previously by reefers also had high lithium levels as an impurity.

Furthermore, 1ppm of lithium seems to have minimal impact to corals from what I've gathered so far from Google. I'll get some lithium chloride on hand in the case it is required.

If you want to share any links, I'd be curious to see what info you've found so far in the lithium-algae connection.

Like I said, I don't remember anything but speculation back in the day.

 

[JonasRoman]

There is a recent YouTube video from Triton stating increasing lithium to 1ppm would help tackle bryopsis. Does this impact SPS or algae in a refugium?

I strongly doubt that. Lithium has no biological function at all, so its existence is more just to build up the salinity and osmotic potential. But compated to Na and Cl, its impact is very small on the osmotic pressure, so an increase or decrease should probably have no effect at all. Only risk for sure is if too high levels it may be toxic, like many other traces that lack or not lack,biological functions.

Jonas

 

[JWsticks]

There is a recent YouTube video from Triton stating increasing lithium to 1ppm would help tackle bryopsis. Does this impact SPS or algae in a refugium?

I strongly doubt that. Lithium has no biological function at all, so its existence is more just to build up the salinity and osmotic potential. But compated to Na and Cl, its impact is very small on the osmotic pressure, so an increase or decrease should probably have no effect at all. Only risk for sure is if too high levels it may be toxic, like many other traces that lack or not lack,biological functions.

Jonas

Hopefully the abalone does it's thing. I've done some searching on many reefing sites and can only make correlations with dosing Kent Tech M increases lithium over 1ppm and also seeing some posts with reefers dosing mag flake also with high lithium and tanks were fine.

I'll prolly setup a 5 gallon bucket with bryopsis on a rock as an experiment before dosing into the display