Stunning. I went back and read the entire thread. Good show, Sir.
I see that you were stating that you had high nitrates. Then you showed low nitrates. Was that a swing or are you now maintaining low nutrients?
I will continue follow and watch your thread.
Thank you,
Kevin
Hi, thank you for your compliment.
I started keeping acros about 2~3 year ago with a mind set: Acroporas need clean water. To follow that mind set, I was crazy about numbers. There was a time I test for nitrate, phosphate 3~4 times a weeks! GFO, Biopellet reactors really did a good job. I was happy that I could keep the nitrate and phosphate down to undetectable level.
At that time, non of my sps growing. They just sit there, brown, green, minimal polyps extension...no grow archived. I was upset, but I never thought that was because of the nutrient.
And because my tank was not doing good, I changed a lot of other factors:
First thing I think of is Light: Metal Halide, then metal halide with t5s supplement, then change to 6 bulbs t5s fixture, then t5s with leds supplement, change to LED, and change again to LE+T5. (non of the change improve my tank conditions)
Then change in Supplement: I dosed almost of every products that "boost growth", "improve color" on the market like KZ, Red Sea, Acropowers....... (The tank condition still the same).
Besides that, I change in flow, chiller, change from sand bed to bare bottom, change light schedule, man I can't remember all! But I NEVER thought about my filtration. It is good, it is perfect, no change need. That is what I thought at that time! DEAD WRONG.
Every thing had done in a course of 1 year.
Then one day, I read a tank's thread of someone, and he talked about the "heavy import, heavy export method". I again decided to make another change in my tank.
From only 3 fishes: Yellow tang + 2 clownfish. (1/2 cube of brine shrimp per day. no coral feeding ever) I went to 10 fishes (feed 1 cube+ pellet. I noticed some very small positive responses in some of the sps (gettting darker). My filtration still did a very good job: Keep NO3/PO4 at undetectable level (I was still very happy with my filtration system).
I began to realize how effective nutrients on acropora. To boost the positive effects, I started dosing nitrate. BOOMs, first time since I kept acropora, I saw their polyps and other colors rather than brown and pale/whitish green. However, one disadvantage of dosing nitrate was it was not stable. The NO3 went high after dose, but return to 0 ppm after 12-24 hours.
At this time, I decide to get rid of the Biopellet reactor and GFO reactor. It was a right move, but definitely not a smart one. Too fast, my acros drop like flies! After a week, there were only 2 kind of acro in my tank: the DEAD ones and the HAPPY ones!
This picture was taken on 02/08/2015. Notice there was no coraline algae or other kind of algae even the tank had been running almost one year.
One year later, this is after I took off the reactors (stop dosing nitrate, keep feed the fishes at normal, no corals feeding). The picture is not good (I still didn't know how to use a dslr camera at this time), but I can swear that this Shade of Fall literally look rainbow.
Date: 03/06/2016 (13 months later)
Same thing happen on my Strawberry shortcake:
03/05/2015
03/26/2016 : you can see how patient I have got for this guys. Sitting in the middle of my tank for ONE YEAR with no growth and he still not in the trash can yet.
then here it is 07/11/2016 less than 4 months later:
and the Shade of Fall : 08/05/2016
Let go back to when the reactors gone. After the rtn stop, and the survivals became "rainbow". At this time, whenever I test for Nitrate and Phosphate, they were extremely high. (Notice the macro algae in the shade of fall picture_all kind of micro, macro algae appeared that that time). I didn't under stand how sps could survive with that high nutrients. (25-50ppm Nitrate, 0.07-0.1 Phosphate). So I decide to stop test for them at all.
So if you ask me if high or low nutrients is good for acro. Honestly, I don't know man. There is not such thing as "high" or "low". My test numbers say it "Low", but how can I say I have low nutrients level when a thick algae film on the glass appear almost everyday, look at all the turf algae I have (previous post), and I even have bubble algae that bigger than a turbo snail!
Heavy import/Heavy export with Bacteria and Macro algae based is a method that work for me.
p/s: pls forgive for my English. It's not my mother language.
