Is my filtration slowing my maturity?

[Miami Reef]

Tank is 5 weeks old.

Nitrates are 0.5ppm. Phosphate is pretty low too. I feed heavily and I have a large bio load. 7 tangs.

No ammonia FYI. People said I need to wait for my reef to fully mature before adding a clam which is solid advice, but a few people said that my filtration is slowing my maturity rate.

I have 5 micron socks changed daily and a brand new protein skimmer which I added 3 days ago. The filter socks turn fully brown in less than a day.

My brother surprised me by purchasing a lot of LPS corals last week, so now I'm taking care of these animals, but is it true that my tank's maturity rate is slowed down? I didn't get any ugly stage yet. Maybe a tiny bit of cyano on the sand bed, but better flow fixed it. I had some dark diatoms near the top of the rock structures, but it cleared up after the tangs were added.


Am I preventing my tank from maturing? I will attach the latest picture I have of my tank. It looks super sterile. I have an oversized UV sterilizer as well.

 

[Miami Reef]

I recently scrapped the back glass. But there was algae accumulating FYI. Maybe enough to darken the background but not enough to see hair waving around.

 

[ZoWhat]

Ooooh dude. Corals at 5 weeks?

Reefs take at least 6mos to develop all that complex water chemistry that takes a PhD to figure out

I'd find a mature tank of someone you know.

If you start losing corals, you can quickly transfer to the mature tank.

Hope you have plenty of beer on hand come the 4th of July


.

 

[dvgyfresh]

You possibly could be, or preventing the tank to stabilize , I don’t have too much knowledge to share but in my sump I don’t clean anything and one bottom side is filled with mulm, I think mulm is necessary for a reef as it provides many things like sponges , detrivores, bacteria ect and it helps stabilizes a tank

 

[dedragon]

What zoa said, you need a plan b incase things start to decline as the tank is just too new of a setup to be going so fast. Dont buy anymore corals for at least another 1-2 months to let the tanks settle and figure out how much dosing you are going to need to deal with calcium and dkH uptake. Dont want to add more corals (although it looks like you have 1000+ in corals right now) and they all go south you know, this hobby is more about patience, the older and more mature the tank, the more biologically stable it becomes

 

[Miami Reef]

Oh no! Ok. Deep breaths for me. Right now my parameters are safe for the corals. I added some live rocks recently. Would it be a waste of time and money to purchase more live rocks?


I don't know what else I can do. As I said, I didn't purchase the corals myself. I was planning on waiting and at least start with soft corals...but anyway the damage was done.


What could possible cause a death in my corals besides for a change in my parameters? I understand that people need to wait for maturity, but what is it about the maturity? I know algae won't ever get to a point of smothering the corals because I have a lot of herbivores. I'm trying to think of what else could kill them but nothing is registering.


Luckily my corals are having really good polyp extension. I'm dosing amino acids and phyto. Maintaining stable parameters too. I get large water changes monthly.

 

[Miami Reef]

I will not add more corals and I'll make sure my brother won't buy anymore either for a few months until my levels stabilize.

 

[Jekyl]

The maturing of a tank isn't really something that can be managed or tested for. The tank will go through all kinds of cycles, not just the ammonia/nitrate one. There are things competing at the microscopic level. Like I said in another post it all just takes time. Coraline is usually the indicator that things are balancing out. Usually it starts showing up after half a year or so.