A little warning - I do not know if it is true for your shrimps but frozen products for human consumptions are sometimes treated with phosphorus compounds before freezing. E338 - E343 and E450-452 are such compounds. In Sweden - E numbers is reported on the package - do not know how it is in the US.
I do not want to bring it Down quick... I want to manage it it down to a lower number over the long term
Oooofffff.... didn’t know that! I’ll look into it. Thank you
Nice write up... thank you for this. However, my over simplified comment about this being about “my” feeding behavior is still accurate. Here are the changes I made in the last two weeks...I think that takeaway is not right and not what Randy concludes or recommends in this article or elsewhere. Sure, not feeding will lower your inputs, but as the article shows, it really doesn't take much food to spike up your numbers: "I have not seen compelling evidence that not feeding, or feeding remarkably less, is a good overall solution to having high numbers. It also depends a whole lot on what anials you are feeding." Even the light feeding of a single cube of a relatively low phosphate frozen food to this aquarium supplied most of that target amount in a single feeding. Heavy feeding added ten times that amount in a single day." But we can ask him @Randy Holmes-Farley , am I reading you wrong?
Your inputs are where the nutrients are most likely coming from (but they may be coming from your source water, your salt mix, or any number of other potential inputs, but you have to feed animals (all of them, not just the fish) so they have enough to eat. It would be weird to feed your baby less because you didn't want to deal with diapers.
Reducing the food to get numbers one likes better seems off to me, and sometimes cruel because it can result in not enough food for the animals, as well as no meaningful reduction in nutrients. If the numbers matter to you, I think this is about export (or changing your expectations around the numbers you are chasing). I think it is better all around to keep feeding heavy, but export the nutrients (GFO, Lanthanum, more algae, more water changes, etc) if you don't like your current numbers.
I have not seen compelling evidence that not feeding, or feeding remarkably less, is a good overall solution to having high numbers. It also depends a whole lot on what anials you are feeding.
That said, I would be interested if the results of your feeding changes, as long as you make no other changes to the system in the time that you are logging the effects of those changes. Most of the time, anecdotes around this topic are made more difficult because people are trying many things at the same time to make a difference.
Other than feeding... I starting putting the PhosGaurd in a reactor I was using for Carbon (I put the carbon in a mesh bag.
I reduced the amount of time I leave Nori sheets in the tank from 24/7 down to just 4 hours and only every other day.
I replaced feeding dehydrated krill (for my eel and anemone) with human grade frozen shrimp.
I am feeding the same amount of frozen food, but now I am washing out the liquid parts of the frozen foods.
I reduced the amount of pellets I feed from 4 scoops to 3. These are high in phosphate but still very nutritional for my fish.
As of this morning my Phosphates are down to .21.
Are you saying that nothing else I am doing matters at all?
You got any pics of your tank? I looked at your threads and didn’t see any threads with tank builds or any thing. Suggesting that 1.3 is somehow acceptable seams a bit off. Or am I reading into it wrong?Mine is 1.3
He has a build thread... and by the looks of it, one of the nicest tanks I have ever seen!!!
www.reef2reef.com
