Has anyone experienced RTN / STN that coincided with ammonia dosing? I ask because there is a small contingent of us that anecdotally get RTN / STN when nitrate dosing.
Should we banish Nitrate dosing?
If we read this investigation : http://cris.leibniz-zmt.de/id/eprint/4590/1/Zhao 2021.pdf and read the conclusion of HW Balling in case of STN/RTN : Shouldn't we all stop dosing nitrates? I have a sps dominated tank for 5 years now and I only lost a few colonies during the few months I started...www.reef2reef.com
Addition of nitrate and STN
I decided to write this thread to document my strange experience in which I can only draw theories but may have an answer. Every time I add any form of nitrate manually to my tank it starts an STN event in my sps. I have tried calcium nitrate esv and homemade, potassium nitrate, and ammonium...
I dosed 0.1 ppm ammonia for two days, and noticed a small amount of RTN / STN on a Leptoseris, that has been chuggin along for months. Correlation is not causation and I cannot say for certain it was the ammonia dosing that caused this. I probably just spooked myself, but I'm curious if others have experienced STN/RTN when ammonia dosing.
This paper seems to corroborate that elevated N03 can increased bleaching... Conversley, it states increased NH4 seems to help prevent bleaching! "In particular, nitrate (NO3−) enrichment reduces thermal tolerance while ammonium (NH4+) enrichment tends to benefit coral health." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7371892/
Hi Randy. Do you know if it’s safe to mix ammonium bicarbonate with potassium phosphate in my RO water? My tank is fallow at the moment, so I’m having to dose both. Many thanks
When dosing just NO3, I found levels around 15-20 gave reasonable coral health, since dosing ammonium I find that a NO3 level around 2-5 is definitely adequate, it's interesting to note the difference.
I would agree with this, if you just dose ammonium it heavily suppresses algae in my experience switching from KNO3 to ammonium all the algaes in my tank got wiped out, I use a mix to keep some present for the grazers now.
A little over 3 months in and this is an absolute game changer. I dose anywhere from 10-20ml, 4-5 times a week when I remember. I haven’t checked N and P recently but when I first started I kept track. My PO4 dropped from .4ppm to .2ppm in the first couple weeks. My NO3 went from 0 to 10ppm and held flat. I need to test again and see where everything is but my corals have shown marked color and growth improvement across the board.
I can tell I’ve forgotten to dose for a few days when a light dusting of brown starts to creep up on the sand. Dose ammonia for a few days and it all goes away. My theory when this happens is that nitrogen is becoming super limited and it’s likely a strain of dinos trying to pop up. Get some nitrogen back in the tank and the dinos can’t out compete other organisms.
