Does my tank need iodine, strontium, and/or trace element dosing?

[glb]

I have a 40g breeder that is three years old. It is a softie/LPS tank. My current corals are two acans, one torch coral, one Duncan, three zoa colonies, two rock flower anemones, a sympodium, and two rhodactus (I think) mushrooms. I have six fish: two clownfish, one chromis, one Midas Blenny, one Diamond goby, and one Ruby headed fairy wrasse. I have a 4-bulb ATI fixture. It is currently running 5 1/2 hours/day after treating an algae outbreak (long story), and I am increasing the light schedule 30 minutes/week so I won’t shock the corals. Eventually I’d like to get the lights to about 8 hours daily.

As far as husbandry, I do AWC’s daily for a total of 5g/week, or about 10%. I dose alk and ca daily. My salt mix is Instant Ocean. I test weekly. My last test results were the following: Alk 8dkh, Ca 430ppm, No3 8ppm, Po4 0.02ppm, ph 7.88, temp 78 and salinity 34. I feed the fish and corals mysis shrimp daily and Spectrum pellets a few times a week. I also feed the corals Reef Roids every week or so and Korallen-Zucht LPS food about once/week.

I’ve been reading up on the corals I have and dosing iodine, strontium, and trace elements is recommended for most of them. With my current husbandry and the relatively small amount of corals I have, do you think dosing would be beneficial? I’m very aware that dosing things you can’t test for is tricky. But now that I can do the Triton test, that’s not an issue. My corals look healthy but aren’t growing very quickly.

I appreciate any help! I like do a ton of research before making any changes and I always get great advice from R2R!

 

[X-37B]

With your current load the awc are all thats needed, imo.
And thats comming from somenone who follows a no scheduled water change regiment.

 

[glb]

With your current load the awc are all thats needed, imo.
And thats comming from somenone who follows a no scheduled water change regiment.

Thanks! I thought so. When I have a lot more coral in there, it may be a different story, but that’s going to take a while!

 

[dricc]

Thanks! I thought so. When I have a lot more coral in there, it may be a different story, but that’s going to take a while!

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

IMO, strontium is not useful to dose. Only very unusual organisms have a known need for strontium. IMO, reefers have confused random incorporation into skeletons with a useful process.

Aquarium Chemistry: Strontium and the Reef Aquarium

This article on strontium is the second of several that delve into a variety of issues involving magnesium and strontium.

reefs.com

IME, iodine dosing was not useful, and scientific publications do not show a need for most organisms we keep (certain gorgonia do use iodine to make a specific material), but there is a wide range of folks who claim it is useful, especially for zooanthids. I remain unconvinced and if you choose to dose it, I'd do it as an experiment, not a "must do"

Chemistry And The Aquarium: Iodine in Marine Aquaria: Part I

This first article will cover what is known about iodine in the oceans, including what forms it takes and how toxic these forms are, what organisms use it, how they obtain it, and what they use it for. It will also detail some issues around iodine measurement and what natural sources of iodine...

reefs.com

Trace elements are certainly needed by all photosynthetic organisms. Whether and which ones are useful to dose is a more complicated question. Certainly iron can be useful, but I expect others can be as well. Only way to know for sure is to measure and/or dose as an experiment. FWIW, even a measurement does not ultimately answer the question by itself since it is not established what levels of which chemical forms of which trace elements are required for each and every organism we keep (not for any of them, actually).