Am I feeding too much?

[sluicebox]

I have a 150 gallon tank with one tang, one foxface, one blenny, two clowns, a goby, a dottyback, one six-line wrasse, and three chromis for a total of 11 fish (about 30" total). I feed them 2 cubes of Marine Cuisine and Mysis Shrimp and one full sheet of Nori daily. The fish are fat but my nitrates are 2 ppm and phosphates are .030 ppm and fairly consistent at those levels. I have a little cyanobacteria in a corner with low flow on the sandbed and very little hair algae kept well trimmed by the fish....not problems in my opinion.

I am running Ecobak about 600 ml.

I've been reading on this and other forums about folks feeding at much lower rates. It just made me wonder if I am way overfeeding my tank? Or, are these other folks simply starving their livestock to maintain a low nutrient system? Am I setting myself up for a major problem?

 

[fragmatic]

Short answer IMO is NO!

I believe in FEEDING your tank. If you are not clouding the water and are not having spikes, and have a working skimmer and/or algae scrubber, go for it!


My present tank build is just about 7 months old, this time. It was when I started to feed my tank well that it absolutely turned the corner. There is no doubt.

 

[gmoney243]

I would say ur overfeeding just a tad. I have 6"+ sailfn tang 5" blue tang
3" clown tang ,4 anthias, 7 chromis, 5" melanurus wrasse, carpenters wrasse, 2 clowns and a target mandarin but he doesnt eat anything i put in. And i only feed like a cube and a few flakes a day and half sheet nori every other day. And all fish are fat.

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[Dowtish]

You could cut back a little and see if your phosphates go down any.

But I would add more ecobak and just let it lower your phosphate. Get it up to 800ml and see how it goes down.

 

[gmoney243]

His phos is .03 i dont think he needs to worry bout lower phos. I would just cut back because theres no reason to feed them so much. They will get to fat and lazy haha

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[Dowtish]

His phos is .03 i dont think he needs to worry bout lower phos. I would just cut back because theres no reason to feed them so much. They will get to fat and lazy haha

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I just looked back over the post. I swore it said .30 for phos. My bad.

 

[sluicebox]

His phos is .03 i dont think he needs to worry bout lower phos. I would just cut back because theres no reason to feed them so much. They will get to fat and lazy haha

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If your fish are fat and lazy like their owner, they don't tend to jump from the tank and you can eliminate the screen. Right? LOL:bigsmile:

 

[kuyatwo]

Full sheet of nori is quite a bit....you feed the cubes throughout the day or all at once?


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[sluicebox]

Full sheet of nori is quite a bit....you feed the cubes throughout the day or all at once?


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I feed the nori all at once of course. But, the cubes are fed in 2-3 different feedings during the day.

 

[Neptunus]

I recently had cyano with 0 Nitrates and 0 Phosphates. But at 2 Nitates and 0.03 Phosphates I wouldn't worry about your food volume. IMO it sounds like a good number to me as long as it is steadyily at that number and not going up and down. Stability is the key. Personally my corals seem to do better with a little higher phosphate but again that is just me. Secondly I have heard many people swearing the more times they feed their tank in smaller portions when they were running bio pellets the better. As long as you run the reactor exhaust near a great skimmer is the key. I would go by how your sps growth and colors are reacting.

 

[WillKatt]

Just curous how long has this tank been esatblished? I know i wasnt able to feed as much without No3 and Po4, cyano issues until about a year into having my tank set up. I could be way off base here but I think sometimes its can take a good while for all different types of good bacteria to fully establish.

However I also started my tank with dry rock and dry sand so that in itself might explain my situation. I'm alays afraid im overfeeding as well.