I understand your question but want to clarify what your asking
Yes, Calc, alk, and elements. I doubt it has ever been scientificly quantified how much the use per... mm or in of growth.... but was just thinking, at what point is the load of a bunch of tiny new frags going to be noticeable.I understand your question but want to clarify what your asking
When you said drain nutrients to you mean things like like nitrate and phosphate ?
Or do you mean things like calcium, alkalinity and trace elements ?
You can fit as many corals as you can pack in but things are affected, drained, and need to be replenished
Here’s my tank. I’m pretty low on space. Added magnet racks to get more. Im always adding frags to grow out and as they get larger I move them to other places.
Adding booger frags won’t make a huge impact but as they grow, calcium and alkalinity are removed from the water. As they all get larger they will make more noticeable impacts and you’ll need to increase dosing
Depends on the coral. Stony corals consume more than lps. And softies don’t really consume much at all.
Heres 2 gallons and 5 gallons loaded to the brim with no filtration for reference. Alk consumption was noticeable pretty early on with all of the sps. Water changes deal with most problems. I end up dosing nitrates and phosphates as well because the corals suck them up. Hard to really quantify specific consumption because all of the bacterias and algaes in the rockwork also utilize alot of the same nutrients etc…. Coralline sucks up more ca,alk, mag. Green hair algae and other algaes will suck up more nitrates and phosphates. Sps tend to use alot more alk, ca, mg. softies tend to use alot more nitrate and phos in my experience. A setup like this, probably a little more dialed in, would probably be about as close as you could get to measuring that on an individual frag basis. For reference consumption on the 2g bowl at its peak was 2-3 dkh a day(maintained using AFR), ~10 nitrates per week,and maybe .02 phosphates per week.
Nice, I know it can be done since I did something similar with flow and biodegradable adhesives that was used with coral for my PhD project. But the resources available from grants is very different then what I'm willing to do at home.Heres 2 gallons and 5 gallons loaded to the brim with no filtration for reference. Alk consumption was noticeable pretty early on with all of the sps. Water changes deal with most problems. I end up dosing nitrates and phosphates as well because the corals suck them up. Hard to really quantify specific consumption because all of the bacterias and algaes in the rockwork also utilize alot of the same nutrients etc…. Coralline sucks up more ca,alk, mag. Green hair algae and other algaes will suck up more nitrates and phosphates. Sps tend to use alot more alk, ca, mg. softies tend to use alot more nitrate and phos in my experience. A setup like this, probably a little more dialed in, would probably be about as close as you could get to measuring that on an individual frag basis. For reference consumption on the 2g bowl at its peak was 2-3 dkh a day(maintained using AFR), ~10 nitrates per week,and maybe .02 phosphates per week.
