Possible phosphate starvation.

[Golotron]

Hello community for the first time!
I hope you don't find this too extensive but I'd like to be explicative for a better description of my history .
For reasons that are matter of another subject I decided to transfer all my hard coral to my Reefer 625 and leave my Eheim 450 for softies only. Originally my acros and monties were in the smaller and mature tank but after a year of running the reefer and a couple of sps "canaries" I thought it was time to transfer, keeping in mind this would be unstabilizing but manageable. There was not too much rock in the reefer so I could place practically all my aquascape from the smaller tank. Focusing now only in the Reefer, everything was running smoothly for a couple of weeks, nitrates 5ppm, Phosphates some times undetectable and some times showing 0.1 with an ordinary Redsea marine test kit, so I went for the Ultra-low Pro kit showing 0.03. I were happy until . . .
SPS corals started to look pale. Tested again and Nitrates ~ 16, Phosphates .03. My thought was the spike in NO3 was the reason, I waited for everything to settle, though.

Then probably the increment of mature rock did its job and both nutrients depleted for a couple weeks, undetectable, so my thinking was . . . get more fish! a friend of mine was eager to pass me his Z. desjardini as its was overgrowing his tank. This little ******* has a lot of personality ( I like it very much) and appetite, after another two weeks ALL my montipora, colonies of confusa, even the plating "plague" I used to trim often started to disappear, quickly. Tested again, nitatrates 20ppm or little more, phosphates 0.03, now slowly I notice my acros are starting to lose tissue at the base and some tips. I had to do something , for the first time two days ago I began in carbon dosing at the minimum indicated and tested today, NO3 20ppm or so and PO4 undetectable, I understand that bacteria uses phosphates as well in order to utilize nitrates, so I think I should dose phosphates in order to keep them as originally and all this mess is due to the unbalance of nitrate-phosphate ratio. My alkalinity within all the time frame of events has been 7.6 - 8.4 with no spikes, so I am disregarding it.
My fish feed mainly on all the flakes of Ocean Nutrition, and occasionally Vitalis for grazers, dried artemia and home made frozen, so I am a little impressed the phosphate is so low.
I may have available Seachem Flourish after the weekend in order to rise the PO4 , so by now I am just increasing the frozen food to add on some Phosphorous and keeping the carbon dose but I feel I am loosing control of the tank.

By the way, I am running a refuguim with macroalgea but is not showing much grow from the beginning (six months ago or so) compared with the other tank which grows constantly.

Any advise from your expertise, guys?
Thank you for reading me !

 

[vetteguy53081]

You didn’t mention brand of test kit, but May be a false reading. Did you acclimate the corals to the new tank as if you just purchased them? This sometimes overlooked and causes this very issue
Feeding will obviously raise the Pho’s gradually.

 

[Golotron]

Hi! The test kit is RedSea, two of them actually. The first one the normal low range and the second one ULR Pro, but same brand. As I own the two aquariums I couldn't do an acclimation because I transferred the rock blocks as a whole and not in pieces, but what I did was maintaining alkalinity, calcium, temperature, magnesium at very same levels. The two tanks were running with all same salt, additives, RO and nutrients were also similar + - 3ppm difference in NO3, the rest of the parameters no more of 10% difference, even the temperature was the same as it is under controllers, but what you mention is very likely, probably was a "shock" as the corals had grown from little frags to medium colonies in the previous tank and of course no tanks are identical. Hopefully it stabilizes shortly because looking at them thriving and then dying out is heart breaking.