Nitrates and the uglies!!

[Red_Beard]

I have gone through the uglies, a couple times. Ive beaten back bryopsis and GHA, bouted with cyano, danced with dinos. All that to say, I am not without some small degree of experience. My question to you is this:
What effect do nitrates have on this whole process?

In my experience, when levels were near zero I seemed to have the hardest time getting rid of it (especially the green hair type of algaes). My tank has a healthy appetite and eats through nitrates fairly quickly, and as such i have been manually dosing ammonium bicarbonate mixed with a bit of urea, but through the Thanksgiving and holiday season I got a little distracted and the tank got neglected. My nitrates usually sat around 3-5ppm, but had dropped closer to 0-.2ppm, and hair algae started to rear it's ugly head!

I have in the last few weeks been a little extra heavy handed with dosing and nitrates are back up to around 2ppm and I have not had to manually harvest as much hair algae, and have even seen it recede a bit now after manual removal.

What have been your experiences with this? Is the old way of thinking, to try and starve out algae/the uglies wrong? Or is this all a case of mistaken correlation?

 

[Subsea]

After 55 years of reefing, I never subscribed to low nitrate. With a mature reef tank, I regularly dose ammonia.

PS: Your corals look great.

 

[Red_Beard]

After 55 years of reefing, I never subscribed to low nitrate. With a mature reef tank, I regularly dose ammonia.

PS: Your corals look great.

Thank you!

When i first started this tank, i did try the whole 'starve it' low nitrate approach. I had cyano covering litterally everything that wasnt being directly blasted with flow. I started dosing both nitrates and phosphates and as soon as nitrates got up around 5ppm or so and were there consistently, the cyano just kind of went away on its own. Same with my fist bout of hair algae. I think that the lower level life forms are better at scavenging those things than corals so all super low levels do is starve the stuff you do want to grow.

 

[exnisstech]

My experience has been similar to yours. Anytime I've had nuisance algae, cyano, dino etc. has always been tanks with low N and P.

NO3 25-40 and PO4 0.3 -0.9+ not a problem.

 

[Reeferbadness]

I also dose Nitrate (NeoNitrate) as my refugium sucks all the nitrates out of the system. My corals are much happier and algae is really not a problem. Ideally mine are around 5-10 and Phos i like to be around .08 - 1.0

 

[Red_Beard]

My experience has been similar to yours. Anytime I've had nuisance algae, cyano, dino etc. has always been tanks with low N and P.

NO3 25-40 and PO4 0.3 -0.9+ not a problem.

WOW! That tank is looking fantastic! Did you start dosing snow or what are you doing to keep your water so crystal clear?

I also dose Nitrate (NeoNitrate) as my refugium sucks all the nitrates out of the system. My corals are much happier and algae is really not a problem. Ideally mine are around 5-10 and Phos i like to be around .08 - 1.0

Beautiful tank! Love those giant healthy colonies! Wish i could get my plates to spiral, i love that iconic spiraled plate look. Very nice.


Thanks for bringing receipts to back up your statements!

 

[exnisstech]

WOW! That tank is looking fantastic! Did you start dosing snow or what are you doing to keep your water so crystal clear?

No snow or anything special. Socks skimmer and 25g weekly WCs on 285g total. I did just clean the glass lol.

 

[GoAskAlice]

My experience is much like yours. I've rarely had detectable nitrates. Tried dosing for awhile and then stopped, focusing instead on keeping phosphates at a detectable level to (hopefully) avoid dinos. But with 0 nitrates I still spend maintenance time pulling out gha. I focus on how my corals look and at present they seem to be fine without the nitrates. But watching this thread for all opinions and experiences.

 

[Andamaite]

I think it's pretty similar to FW planted tanks in that regard: The algae is very good at sucking every bit of 'juice' it can, where as everything else is a little less capable and seemingly relies on the stars aligning to grow.

That's ultimately why my nano always had display macro. If the macro started to take off I knew something was out of whack, but it would always (or nearly always) occupy the GHA niche and keep it from starting up. That's also why I didn't mind whatever strain of "big" bubble algae I had. It would come and go, but at least it wasn't hair algae.

 

[GoAskAlice]

I think it's pretty similar to FW planted tanks in that regard: The algae is very good at sucking every bit of 'juice' it can, where as everything else is a little less capable and seemingly relies on the stars aligning to grow.

That's ultimately why my nano always had display macro. If the macro started to take off I knew something was out of whack, but it would always (or nearly always) occupy the GHA niche and keep it from starting up. That's also why I didn't mind whatever strain of "big" bubble algae I had. It would come and go, but at least it wasn't hair algae.

Right, I feel if I have gha I have nitrates, it's just the algae is so efficient at gobbling them up. But if the algae is so efficient at utilizing the nitrates, wouldn't adding additional nitrates on a regular basis just fuel more algae?

 

[CHSUB]

I don’t try to “starve” algae with low nutrients, if you look at the ocean algae is very capable of survival with very low nutrients, Cyano for example, can fix n2 for energy and dinoflagellates can consume that same cyano and survive in the ocean with nearly zero no3. However, there in no doubt corals are healthier when nutrients are low. Without super charged bacteria in a closed system with fed fish, it is nearly impossible to lower nutrients enough where corals will suffer.

 

[Coral&Cocktails]

I think it's pretty similar to FW planted tanks in that regard: The algae is very good at sucking every bit of 'juice' it can, where as everything else is a little less capable and seemingly relies on the stars aligning to grow.

That's ultimately why my nano always had display macro. If the macro started to take off I knew something was out of whack, but it would always (or nearly always) occupy the GHA niche and keep it from starting up. That's also why I didn't mind whatever strain of "big" bubble algae I had. It would come and go, but at least it wasn't hair algae.

I’ve never grown macros but will in the new tank I’m starting up. This was my initial viewpoint and reason why. It does not hurt that they’re also pretty!

 

[Red_Beard]

I think it's pretty similar to FW planted tanks in that regard: The algae is very good at sucking every bit of 'juice' it can, where as everything else is a little less capable and seemingly relies on the stars aligning to grow.

That's ultimately why my nano always had display macro. If the macro started to take off I knew something was out of whack, but it would always (or nearly always) occupy the GHA niche and keep it from starting up. That's also why I didn't mind whatever strain of "big" bubble algae I had. It would come and go, but at least it wasn't hair algae.

I don’t try to “starve” algae with low nutrients, if you look at the ocean algae is very capable of survival with very low nutrients, Cyano for example, can fix n2 for energy and dinoflagellates can consume that same cyano and survive in the ocean with nearly zero no3. However, there in no doubt corals are healthier when nutrients are low. Without super charged bacteria in a closed system with fed fish, it is nearly impossible to lower nutrients enough where corals will suffer.

Right, I feel if I have gha I have nitrates, it's just the algae is so efficient at gobbling them up. But if the algae is so efficient at utilizing the nitrates, wouldn't adding additional nitrates on a regular basis just fuel more algae?

you would think so, but the opposite has been my experience.


@CHSUB does bring up a good point, and one that is discussed in a few other threads here too. In the ocean the levels are low, but infinitely low, on the reef at least. Conversely, in our tanks, they are low, but finitely low because we just don't have that kind of volume.
But, sometimes just because you can't measure nitrates in your tank, that doesn't mean your tank isn't getting nitrogen. For instance, If you are feeding heavy, you are adding a ton of nitrogen into your tank. If you can't measure it, it is because your tank 'metabolizes' it just as quick as you are adding it so there isn't an accumulation of nitrates. I think tank as a whole has to be considered. For example a tank that measures 0 nitrates that also doesn't feed much, might end up with loads of problems from uglies to pale starving corals. Whereas, another tank, also measuring 0 nitrates that feeds very heavily might not.

There has been some research about which forms of nitrogen corals most readily uptake, and nitrate is one of the ones they have to work hardest to be able to use. (That whole debate and line of research is what lead me to dose ammonium bicarbonate and urea. I have found that my tank can utilize quite a lot of ammonium! I also noticed deeper richer colors in my SPS when dosing.) But that nitrate does serve as a buffer should other sources of nitrogen run out, which is why I like to shoot for around 5ppm.

 

[dvgyfresh]

Always kept nitrate 10-40ppm . I don’t want anything to feel hungry lol , current tank (first) has the lowest nitrate out of the three less than 10ppm and I am battling algae

 

[Andamaite]

Right, I feel if I have gha I have nitrates, it's just the algae is so efficient at gobbling them up. But if the algae is so efficient at utilizing the nitrates, wouldn't adding additional nitrates on a regular basis just fuel more algae?

My knowledge is sorely out of date and rudimentary but the way I understood it is that algae can use effectively "nonexistent" nutrients, and uses them first before anyone else can. That compounds with the second part: It appeared that if the levels of whatever (trace elements? lipids? nitrates? Something!) was off the coral stopped trying to uptake anything or grow at all. My assumption was that this would mean the zooxanthellae would be doing less photosynthesis and therefore leaving those algae-available nutrients for bad algae.

I'm not sure how scientifically correct that theory is, but as a starting point it worked pretty well.

The only down side to adding my own "good" algae was that if I let the macro go nuts and take over I would have a pretty bad rebound effect once it was removed. Mind you, a lot of people would view voluntarily adding caulerpa to their system as objectively worse than hair algae, but manual removal is much easier.

Again, my thinking could be way off in the weeds, but that's what worked well for me in the days of yore.

 

[Aquadude1]

I have had the exact same experience on many tanks. One in particular had a horrible gha with lygnbya(spelling) outbreak. Because of where the tank was we got to test different methods. First we tried skimming wet and a large refugium with gfo. We combined all that with many 50 percent water changes and manual removal. We did that for a solid 4 to 6 months I would say, but it only ever got much worse. We tried blackouts and various cuc members, nothing worked though.
Letting the tank ride and maintaining detectable nutrient seemed to be the trick for that one and many others I've been responsible for.