Will increasing nitrates help

badams.one

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so the P battery i'm talking about is basically the accumulation of organic waste since when you first started the tank. the waste that's in the pores of the rocks, the P binding mechanism that's mentioned by other posters above. so in theory, perhaps every time you fed something, you put more P in than your animals can absorb, and the extra waste gets bound in the substrate and stored in the rock pores. this accumulates little by little, creating stores of P in the rock and sand. then every time something dies, if you don't quickly take it out, the dead flesh rots and get buried in the sand, thus increasing the storage of P (charging the battery).

for feeding fish - give them a variety - you can still feed mysis but rotate it with something else that's more plant/plankton based.

dose amino for your corals if you got a lot - but probably not necessary since your fish pee/poop is already good for corals - and you got a lot of fish.

live sand doesn't hurt. I never used bioblock so not sure about that product. But it still feels like you are trying to do too much too quickly - here you suggested doing 5 things - add sand, reduce feed, increasing filtration (chaeto mass), add bio block, add gfo. i get you want to fix it asap but for a tank that big, it truly takes months for any one little adjustment you make to show its full effect. doing too many things too quickly doesn't make your tank stablize faster and oftentimes has the opposite effect b/c we really don't fully understand all the intricate biochemical process and relationships our tank has. The closest analogy i can make is - you are trying to untangle a ball of yarn that has multiple open threads - pulling at one thread tip is gonna be slow to untangle, but at least you'll be able trace thru the thread. Pulling at all of them at the same time MIGHT make you untangle faster, but more likely will make the yarn knot even tighter.

That's why i suggested only changing feeding and letting chaeto grow out for couple of months. If you go the GFO route then that would be the only change I would do now, b/c gfos can strip out P so effectively that i'd want to monitor and keep everything else status quo for now.
Deal! Again, I really appreciate your help on this. I'll get the gfo going and will provide feedback on the results for the benefit of the community. Cheers!
 

jda

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Do your corals are not likely suffering from low amounts of actual amino acids. Even if they were, there is no supplement that has them all and most don't even tell you which ones are in the supplement, so they are even less likely to work than a supplement that has not been evaluated by the FDA or anything else. ...so the specific aminos probably do not do much, but there can be some other things bound up that can be used when broken down.

Aminos are a math game for most corals. Keep in mind that most waterborne and surface bacteria will want to try and get ahold of them too. Most can assimilate them through their cells and keep and use nearly 100% of their energy, if they can use them at all. A frag has a very tiny surface area. The rest of the tank is larger. This is a losing math problem for your corals especially since you only dose aminos once a day.

In the end, while I have never seen aminos hurt anything, I have never seen any benefit to adding them.

Ammonia/ammonium, however, is a similar math equation for surface area, but your fish make it all of the time, so the odds go up for the corals.

I think that when most people introduce aminos, the waterborne and surface bacteria get most of them and the corals nearly none. This is not all bad since bacteria can also be caught by some microfauna and corals, but this is indirect. There are other things to do to directly impact your corals like more and wider spectrum (quality and quantity) light, appropriate levels of residual N and P while keeping high availability.
 

badams.one

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so the P battery i'm talking about is basically the accumulation of organic waste since when you first started the tank. the waste that's in the pores of the rocks, the P binding mechanism that's mentioned by other posters above. so in theory, perhaps every time you fed something, you put more P in than your animals can absorb, and the extra waste gets bound in the substrate and stored in the rock pores. this accumulates little by little, creating stores of P in the rock and sand. then every time something dies, if you don't quickly take it out, the dead flesh rots and get buried in the sand, thus increasing the storage of P (charging the battery).

for feeding fish - give them a variety - you can still feed mysis but rotate it with something else that's more plant/plankton based.

dose amino for your corals if you got a lot - but probably not necessary since your fish pee/poop is already good for corals - and you got a lot of fish.

live sand doesn't hurt. I never used bioblock so not sure about that product. But it still feels like you are trying to do too much too quickly - here you suggested doing 5 things - add sand, reduce feed, increasing filtration (chaeto mass), add bio block, add gfo. i get you want to fix it asap but for a tank that big, it truly takes months for any one little adjustment you make to show its full effect. doing too many things too quickly doesn't make your tank stablize faster and oftentimes has the opposite effect b/c we really don't fully understand all the intricate biochemical process and relationships our tank has. The closest analogy i can make is - you are trying to untangle a ball of yarn that has multiple open threads - pulling at one thread tip is gonna be slow to untangle, but at least you'll be able trace thru the thread. Pulling at all of them at the same time MIGHT make you untangle faster, but more likely will make the yarn knot even tighter.

That's why i suggested only changing feeding and letting chaeto grow out for couple of months. If you go the GFO route then that would be the only change I would do now, b/c gfos can strip out P so effectively that i'd want to monitor and keep everything else status quo for now.
Hey bud, since we had such a lengthy conversation the other day I wanted to follow up with an update.

Today I learned that the reddish/brown matt growing on my sand and creeping up my rocks is NOT cyano, it's dinos. Under the microscope I found little brown circular shapes moving around in circles like a rumba vacuum that's lost its marbles. This stuff has been slowly growing for months and this whole time I thought it was cyano. Reason being, it looks similar, reddish brown in color, not snotty/stringy as most have posted and my nutrients have never been lacking.

As I mentioned, since setting up the I've always had phosphates running between .08 and .20. I didn't ever pay much attention to my nitrates as my corals have always looked great, I'm somewhat heavily stocked in fish and have always fed well. A few months back when this issue first came about I did notice that my nitrates were practically undetectable and assume this is where the issue came from. I have since however, managed to keep my nitrates between 10 and 20 ppm, but the dinos continue to grow. I'm confused on this as I've never heard of dinos being an issue with nutrients at these levels.

Have you ever heard of dinos with high nutrients?
 

Dkmoo

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Hey bud, since we had such a lengthy conversation the other day I wanted to follow up with an update.

Today I learned that the reddish/brown matt growing on my sand and creeping up my rocks is NOT cyano, it's dinos. Under the microscope I found little brown circular shapes moving around in circles like a rumba vacuum that's lost its marbles. This stuff has been slowly growing for months and this whole time I thought it was cyano. Reason being, it looks similar, reddish brown in color, not snotty/stringy as most have posted and my nutrients have never been lacking.

As I mentioned, since setting up the I've always had phosphates running between .08 and .20. I didn't ever pay much attention to my nitrates as my corals have always looked great, I'm somewhat heavily stocked in fish and have always fed well. A few months back when this issue first came about I did notice that my nitrates were practically undetectable and assume this is where the issue came from. I have since however, managed to keep my nitrates between 10 and 20 ppm, but the dinos continue to grow. I'm confused on this as I've never heard of dinos being an issue with nutrients at these levels.

Have you ever heard of dinos with high nutrients?
Sry i haven't had to deal with dinos personally so don't have any personal experience to draw from. The way I understood dinos problems is that its not so much that the tank is "too clean", its that the lack of excess nutrients is making it harder for bacteria and algae to take hold, and since dinos can absorb nutrients much faster, the lack of natural diversity/competition is causing the proliferation of dinos. Its a sign of unstable/lacking competition in tank, rather than "too clean" per se, bc there will alway be nutrient - its just now that dinos have taken hold of the available nutrient and suppressing the rest of biome from stablishing, fueling the downward cycle. It happens more often in "clean" tanks for this reason but I guess it can still happen in dirty tanks if the dirty tank still has the "lacking competition" condition.

I dont recall your tank history (sry I'm in too many threads lol) but IIRC your tank had a lot of treatment done to correct the previous "cyano/algae " problem right? Perhaps those earlier treatments had decimated the bacteria/algae populations thus giving the current "lacking competiton" condition thats causing dino to thrive.

If its truly dinos I'd probably start with dosing bacteria back in (seachem stability, for ex), manual siphoning, and someone get gha/cyano back into yiur tank lol. (Since those are some of the better nutrient competitors) key is to raise nutrient while trying to reduce dino population manually qt the same time to level the playing field and let the other stuff have a chance to take hold.

You probsbly want to read up on other threads to find out more info and see other options for treatment so you can make the rest decision since what i mentioned above are either all secondary knowledge from what I heard from other peoples dino issues.
 

ScottB

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Hey bud, since we had such a lengthy conversation the other day I wanted to follow up with an update.

Today I learned that the reddish/brown matt growing on my sand and creeping up my rocks is NOT cyano, it's dinos. Under the microscope I found little brown circular shapes moving around in circles like a rumba vacuum that's lost its marbles. This stuff has been slowly growing for months and this whole time I thought it was cyano. Reason being, it looks similar, reddish brown in color, not snotty/stringy as most have posted and my nutrients have never been lacking.

As I mentioned, since setting up the I've always had phosphates running between .08 and .20. I didn't ever pay much attention to my nitrates as my corals have always looked great, I'm somewhat heavily stocked in fish and have always fed well. A few months back when this issue first came about I did notice that my nitrates were practically undetectable and assume this is where the issue came from. I have since however, managed to keep my nitrates between 10 and 20 ppm, but the dinos continue to grow. I'm confused on this as I've never heard of dinos being an issue with nutrients at these levels.

Have you ever heard of dinos with high nutrients?
Yes, you can have a dino outbreak with higher nutrients. Less common for sure, but if you manage to kill off competition, these are edge competitors that can fill the gap in a hurry and hold on to it very well. Folks that try to solve cyano with antibiotics get into trouble this way. Did you dose Chemiclean or Red Slime remover?

Did you confirm which species of dinos? Your roomba description fits a couple, but most likely large cell amphidinium. Possibly prorocentrum. Oval with a beak? Or more round with a circle in the middle?

The large cell amphidinium are the most difficult to get rid of. The others respond well to UV, but these buggers don't swim around at night. There is a dedicated treatment thread started by taricha.
 

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