Impacts of trace element depletion

[Treefer32]

A few months back I switched from Red Sea A, B, C, D Trace element dosing (once a week) to All for reef powder supplemented with calcium chloride and baked baking soda. Around 48 ml of each in my 350 gallon system.

I lost a lot of stuff over this summer including 30 + heads of hammers, a frog spawn, and my montipora and one of my acros receeded. The montipora and acros are slowly coming back now. I had high nutrients - nitrates in the 40s (at their peak) and phosphates up to .5 in their peak.

My hammers had survived high nutrients before. In fact, I'd say they flourished in high nutrients in the past. However, this summer when I switched to All for reef, they slowly died.

I did an ICP Test to see what I had done wrong. The only thing I could find was that both iodine and manganese were 0. I supplemented manganese weekly - 10-12 ml a week as I know Gonipora need that and wanted to make sure I was dosing it. But, it was undetectable in the ICP test. Iodine, I am discovering is critical for coral healing, preventing coral infections, similar as human uses.

Would a lack of iodine, manganese combined with high nutrients have caused a complete loss of anything in the Euphillia family?

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

This is a complicated question, since zero by ICP does not literally mean none, but my guess is that lack of trace elements is not what killed the organisms.

What happened to alk when you switched to AFR?

 

[Treefer32]

Alk, increased slightly, was hovered between 9.5 and 10.3. traditionally I ran alk around 9. So, I wasn't too concerned about it. I will say when I switched to all for reef, per AFR instructions, I continued dosing 2 part as said something about that it wasn't meant to be a complete replacement if you deplete alk or calcium faster than what AFR can replenish creating an imbalance. So, I cut my alk and Calcium dosing in half and replaced it with AFR dosing. I completely pulled Magnesium Chloride and Magnesium sulfate dosing and replaced that with AFR.

Many of my corals washed out and lost color in the meantime. I don't know if sulfates had that much impact or what's in Red Sea's bottled elements had some type of impact, but, colors were significantly brighter prior to AFR dosing as well.

Another thing to note is my turf scrubber stopped producing algae. I had to clean it every 7-10 days because it was so full, and switching to all for reef, the algae stopped growing and I maybe had to clean it once a month, even with high nutrients algae wouldn't grow in the display or in the scrubber.

Since switching back to 2-3 of the sea elements, my scrubber has started to take off again, it's almost full and I just cleaned it last Tuesday (1 week). I acknowledge there may be multiple issues.