Pohl's xtra - Trace elements or coral food?

[Jeanette]

I'm uncertain as to what I'm adding to my tanks when I dose Pohl's xtra. The description includes:

Colour enhancement for hard corals.
Improves color, growth, as well as vitality.
Basic elements. Contains the basic and other most effective elements as well as amino acids necessary for brilliant coloration.

So the description of 1) improves color; and 2) contains the basic and other most effective elements.....
That makes me think trace elements.

But then it also includes amino acids - which would be coral food.

On the KZ list of products with description, Pohl's xtra is listed under the coral nutrition section, not the section for 'Elements and color enhancers'.

I'm currently dosing Red Sea Colors for trace elements - and don't want overkill if I also dose Pohl's xtra.

Anybody have experience or know more what's in it??

 

[landlubber]

zeovit is very cryptic when it comes to describing their additives so it tough to say exactly what but i would favor on the side of coral food.
i tried it for a bottle and got amazing polyp extension in sps but i chose not to stick with it as its pricey and i felt my attention is better spent on refining water and light before i start tinkering with additives that i'm not able to test.

 

[mcarroll]

Anybody have experience or know more what's in it??

If you have to ask, chances are you don't need it.
How could you need it since you don't even know what's in it?
Not logical to need something you can't even identify.

I would quit 100% of the extra supplements.

For what it's worth, to me it sounds like these overlap. They are all redundant if you're feeding your fish with a quality food.

Was there a problem or specific goal you were attempting to address, or were they adopted for "general good"?

 

[Jeanette]

I'm currently dosing Red Sea colors for trace element supplementation. Have been for quite a while. I think my corals are better for it. Lately, my nitrates and phosphates are running close to 0, and I think the corals have suffered and some are starving. I tried adding nitrates - but I really don't like that solution, and it didn't seem to help for long. So, I'm wanting to provide more coral nutrition than what the corals are getting from feeding the fish. I only have 2 fish in my frag tank, so the corals don't get enough nutrition from the fish poop.

I've got a bottle of Pohls xtra that I bought about 6 months ago, but then didn't use. So, I'm planning to try it on my frag tank - but didn't want to be potentially doubling up on dosing trace elements - hence the question!

 

[mcarroll]

I would not look at any of those things as food items....leave em on the shelf.

Nitrate and phosphate dosing can be a great solution in the short term – you corals will drink it up to be used for growth and repair! Just make sure you keep things balanced. I would target 5-10 ppm of NO3 and 0.10 ppm of PO4 if you're going to dose.

And I would definitely recommend both in the short term. It's not going to hurt anything. Worst case scenario, algae grow a little. Bonus to the CUC. It'll definitely have positive effects for your corals, and it'll prevent anything bad from happening with the algae growing in the tank. (There are far worse things than green algae that grow when nutrients are zero.)

As for feeding, I'd suggest something that your corals can eat – baby brine shrimp and fish eggs immediately come to mind. There's a product called Instant Baby Brine Shrimp (IBBS) that I'd suggest as well as @Reef Nutrition's ROE. There are some other similar products. Fish will appreciate these feedings too. Remember for everyone that smaller, more frequent feedings are better than the opposite. I think IBBS might be my favorite.

Don't go too crazy with the new food, but definitely make an increase from current feeding levels. The thing will be to keep the new feeding rate CONSTANT for around a month to see how things do. Keep testing the whole time to see when you can start backing off the N and P dosing.

Make sense?

 

[Jeanette]

I would not look at any of those things as food items....leave em on the shelf.

Nitrate and phosphate dosing can be a great solution in the short term – you corals will drink it up to be used for growth and repair! Just make sure you keep things balanced. I would target 5-10 ppm of NO3 and 0.10 ppm of PO4 if you're going to dose.

And I would definitely recommend both in the short term. It's not going to hurt anything. Worst case scenario, algae grow a little. Bonus to the CUC. It'll definitely have positive effects for your corals, and it'll prevent anything bad from happening with the algae growing in the tank. (There are far worse things than green algae that grow when nutrients are zero.)

As for feeding, I'd suggest something that your corals can eat – baby brine shrimp and fish eggs immediately come to mind. There's a product called Instant Baby Brine Shrimp (IBBS) that I'd suggest as well as @Reef Nutrition's ROE. There are some other similar products. Fish will appreciate these feedings too. Remember for everyone that smaller, more frequent feedings are better than the opposite. I think IBBS might be my favorite.

Don't go too crazy with the new food, but definitely make an increase from current feeding levels. The thing will be to keep the new feeding rate CONSTANT for around a month to see how things do. Keep testing the whole time to see when you can start backing off the N and P dosing.

Make sense?

My target for nitrate has been 4-8 - as those are readings I can make on my Red Sea Nitrate test kit. For PO4, I'm probably shooting for .05. I've got Brightwell's Neo-nitro. It has helped a little, but then after a couple days the reading went back to 0. I need to get some phosphate. Maybe try Seachem's Flourish Phosphage.

Why would you not consider KZ's Pohl's xtra a food item???

I'll look at the Instant Baby Brine Shrimp.

 

[mcarroll]

It has helped a little, but then after a couple days the reading went back to 0.

On top of the action of your denitrifiers removing N2 from the water all the time, nitrogen is also used extensively for most cellular processes including growth, repair and division.

But not only is it used extensively and not only does it have a "permanent bacterial leak" out of the system, but the rate at which it's used is second only to carbon (which is more or less unlimited in the form of CO2). Nitrogen gets used in about a 16:1 ratio with phosphorous for things like growth and division/reproduction.

All that is just to say you can expect to keep adding it as long as things are growing!

One ideal is to get green algae growing – sort of acts as a N-reserve that your snails release a little bit of every time they graze.

 

[mcarroll]

Why would you not consider KZ's Pohl's xtra a food item???

I'm not familiar with it's ingredients, but you named it as a trace element supplement. Food does contain trace elements. But that's not the same.