NSW Parameters are NOT Going to Hurt Your Acropora

jda · Sep 26, 2017

I kinda get upset when I see that people say that lower nutrients will hurt coral. While I am not an advocate of Ultra-Low and driving all N and P out of the water, having N less than 1 and P at about .01 is not going to hurt any acropora - I don't keep MBP&S (other than Leng Sy) but I imagine that this works for them. IMO, there is nothing wrong with having Natural Seawater Level nutrients in the water and acropora can thrive with it.

I am not saying that this is the only way to reef - we all know that is not true. I am not saying that this will work for everybody. I am only saying that NSW parameters are not a death sentence.

I apologize in advance for these horrible photos, but here are some growth shots of just over four months from when a few frags got to my tank on May 2nd until today - the bonsai and red/white were new that day, but the TriColor had a few week head start. Also, took some photos of nitrate with Salifert and Phosphate on Hannah Ultra low for reference.

I am sure that most people on here can have better growth in four-plus months, but I am happy with this... especially the encrusting. The red/white one and the tricolor are about 2" tall now and will be softball size in a year (based on my last few reboots).

May 2nd, 2017

Sept 26th, 2017

May 2nd, 2017

Sept 26th, 2017

Dr.HarlemTutu · Sep 26, 2017

I don't know man... how can corals grow in natural sea water conditions!?! That's gotta be some kind of weird thing?

Kidding of course. I too am pretty much old school too. Several ways to grow corals but the old school is so simple and works so well. The only thing I have added over the years is a controller and a masterflex pump to my calcium reactor. Just plain old live rock and stable perams with small water changes every week.

Salty1962 · Sep 27, 2017

The biggest difference is that in the ocean reefs they're getting constant feedings from phytoplankton, etc. where as in our tanks they do not. We tend not to feed, even if we could match the oceans, due to our attempts to keep near NSW levels. I found my tank very lacking in coloration and growth with my No3 @ 1-2ppm and Po4 @ .01-.02ppm and had to actually feed more often and add KNo3 to get my colors and growth within my expectations. There have been many constructive and intuitive discussions on this subject matter, pro and con. I guess it boils down to what works for your tank as there are no two the same. I'm glad that your tank is doing well with your husbandry practices but they may not work for everyone. So calling one or the other out doesn't give folks options.

Rakie · Sep 27, 2017

Nobody ever said they were going to hurt, we said nutrients fill in the gap that most people with ULNS systems run into (paling, stalling growth, tissue recession, etc etc).

jda · Sep 27, 2017

What does ULNS have to do with this? I am taking about NSW. I have never tried to be ULNS and cannot see any scenario where I ever will.

Donovan Joannes · Sep 27, 2017

IMHO, parameters at NSW surely wouldn't hurt corals, but the amount of food (and varieties) available in the ocean is nowhere to be replicated in our tank. Foods are being replenished every second as it being carried by sea current and waves. You should share your feeding regime (food type and feeding frequency), your refugium (if any) size and what you have in there, your lighting system, water movement, fish load, inhabitants and whether your system does have naturally occurring foods (pods, phyto, healthy micro organism quantity round the clock etc). I always believe a matured tank do have extra "things" in the water that can support a healthy reef at close to NSW parameters, but newly setup or not yet reaching maturity tank will face some issue running their tank at NSW nutrient level. Not saying you are wrong @jda, but we must consider other things as well when discussing this thread.

teller · Sep 27, 2017

How do you distinguish NSW from ULNS values?
0.01ppm for Phosphate seems ULNS.
If you use a colorimetric test kit how sure are you your nitrate level is 1ppm and not 0.25ppm ? Or other value around?
Seems in different areas phosphate in NSW varies between 0.03 and 0.07 or so.

Big E · Sep 27, 2017

I focus on trying to have the system at what I call "high energy". It's not the final numbers that matter as much as the throughput.

On the reef there is a large supply of plankton as well as ammonium, urea and fish poop for the corals to feed on.

Nothing wrong with natural seawater numbers or ULNS as long as the throughput is high enough for good growth and color.

Some enjoy higher numbers which work fine as long as pest algae isn't an issue.

So..........basically good growth and color and no pest algae = PO4 and N03 levels for your system.

From my experience and tracking other successful Acropora dominant systems the ballpark range is P04- .01-.10ppm and NO3- .25- 10ppm. You can get more specific what works best as your corals will tell you.........once that's known those become your target numbers.

2Wheelsonly · Sep 27, 2017

I consider NSW and ULNS very similar; based on your test results there is very little margin of error. You're an advanced reefer; most in this hobby are not. When nutrients are that low I feel you're riding the edge of life and death with corals and you rely on feeding them aminos and whatever else to keep them alive. One missed dose and you may experience death.

If you're making it work then great! At the end of the day we are all trying to sustain life; nutrients work for me and every time I have put GFO or other nutrient export (other than skimmers and waterchanges) I have killed corals. I will never ever rely on some magic bottle with hidden ingredients to keep my stuff alive. I think in a perfect world we ALL want NSW; who wouldn't want super clean algae free water in their system? My eye opener was finally forcing myself to keep nutrients and I never have to worry about high alk, missing a dose, skipping a water change. My colors and success rates on SPS have never been better.

Threw my GFO in the trash, never again will I be afraid of nutrients.

jda · Sep 27, 2017

FWIW - I am straight Berlin. I dose nothing that the CaRx and monthly(ish) water changes cannot provide. No organic carbon or GFO. My many fish eat NLS pellets 3x per day through an auto feeder and I feed mysis just about every night (4-5 a week). I have not fed my corals in fifteen years (when I decided that any benefit was not worth the effort) and I don't add any direct coral food, aminos or anything else in a bottle. I don't use any GAC on this tank, but I would if I wanted to polish the water. I don't have a fuge on this tank. This tank got moved 750 miles in 2010, but was previously setup since about 1998 - you could say that it is established for sure.

I do nothing special to feed coral unless somebody wants to argue that the lights are high quality enough provide all the food that the coral could want and perhaps light quality (not quantity) is the biggest factor in modern reefing for coral food... but that is a can of worms that probably does not need to be opened since nobody would believe it anyway.

Here is the difference in NSW vs ULNS. NSW has no way to export either down to actually zero - the bacteria will always need some N for equilibrium and there will always be some P that cannot bind to aragonite and then later get lowered through growth or water changes. ULNS uses techniques to lower these levels below equilibrium in the tank by using export media and organic carbon with the intent of starving diatoms and algae for different reason (the most common of them is light and more contrasting colors). With NSW, my alk can get to 10 or 11 without burnt tips - with ULNS, it could not. IMO, the difference between NSW and ULNS is as far as from NSW to a 100 N and 1.0 P tank.

Randy Holmes-Farley · Sep 27, 2017

jda said:
I kinda get upset when I see that people say that lower nutrients will hurt coral. While I am not an advocate of Ultra-Low and driving all N and P out of the water, having N less than 1 and P at about .01 is not going to hurt any acropora - I don't keep MBP&S (other than Leng Sy) but I imagine that this works for them. IMO, there is nothing wrong with having Natural Seawater Level nutrients in the water and acropora can thrive with it.

I think nitrate and phosphate values on clean open reefs are often much lower than those values. If you replicated the lower values from the ocean, you may have had different results if you do not have adequate organic foods (e.g., phytoplankton).

BoomCorals · Sep 27, 2017

Randy Holmes-Farley said:
I think nitrate and phosphate values on clean open reefs are often much lower than those values. If you replicated the lower values from the ocean, you may have had different results if you do not have adequate organic foods (e.g., phytoplankton).

This. Also I think Dana Riddle said "the ocean is not a reef tank, and a reef tank is not the ocean." There's a reason we generally don't try to imitate NSW. Randy points out one of them.

Mattrg02 · Sep 28, 2017

I wonder if anyone has done a comparison between daily feedings (target) vs dosing nitrates and phosphates? Seems to me that dosing nutrients is much better way to control what goes into the tank, no?

jda · Sep 28, 2017

Nearly everything that we do is to try and replicate the ocean - even if you don't do it with N and P, you do it with everything else (Ca, Alk, Mag, temp, PH, SG). That quote is incredibly out of context, I would imagine. Ironically, I got the NSW numbers from Dr. Holmes-Farley's own articles. What is really telling is that people were generally better at this when they did more of trying to be like the ocean instead of trying to outsmart nature by using different "systems" and using dry/dead rock.

Like I said, this is not for everybody, but the advice about 2 N and .05 P tanks being "sterile" is just stupid and distracts from finding a real cause.. which is usually a young reef, unstable parameters, lights, or other things that people don't want to hear that they did wrong. ...it just wastes time and effort.

Daniel@R2R · Sep 29, 2017

Interesting discussion.

Rakie · Sep 29, 2017

jda said:
Nearly everything that we do is to try and replicate the ocean

That's not true -- Nearly everything we do is above NSW levels for literally most reefers. We keep alk higher, we strive to keep pH higher, we keep Cal and mag above NSW levels. An extreme minority keep NSW levels. Further, literally zero of the quality aquaculture companies keep anywhere near NSW levels of any parameter.

if NSW params were ideal, than WWC, JFox, and everybody else would be doing that. Instead, nobody is doing it except old school reefers.

JDA, I've tried to talk with you about this before and you immediately become hostile and aggravated. I try and share my knowledge with other people here, and you chime in being hostile and aggravated. I try and speak with you again here, where, you guessed it... Hostile and aggravated. Here you setup your OWN thread, where zero people have come to defense of your methods, including @BoomCorals -- And yet again, in another thread, you become hostile and aggravated.

It's cool that you do things your way, and it's okay that we don't agree. But when you start becoming hostile how could you expect anything but hostility in return? Three times now, on two different forums, you've hounded me, and harassed me, by being insulting, rude, and quarrelsome.

jda said:
I kinda get upset when I see that people say that lower nutrients will hurt coral.

That is not how grown men behave. I love people who have strong opinions. I have strong opinions. I believe conversation with those who have strong opinions enlighten those of us in the hobby -- But there's no place to get offended, to harass, or belittle others.

You have done this to me, on two forums now, because I believe giving corals the things they need to survive, is good for them..

Again -- You are not behaving like an adult male. Disagree with me all you want, but do it from a place devoid of hostility.

Rakie · Sep 29, 2017

I will absolutely say though @jda what I've seen of your tank is absolutely stellar. Again, as I said I have strong opinions, and I like people who have strong opinions. I'm also a firm believer in being transparent, and absolutely nothing in your tank leads me to believe you don't know what you're talking about. You have great colors and really good growth!

All i've ever wanted to say is we skin our cats differently, but we end up arguing instead of talking, and as it takes two to tango I'll be upfront and apologize for that. I'm assuming neither of us come here to argue --

I saw you mention my build thread as well -- it is a new build, it's just about to hit the one year mark. I kept reefs since middle school, took a long break after my first and only tank crashed when I was 15 (early high school, 4 year old nano tank was a toxic death soup one morning) -- I've kept freshwater fish since I was a kid, my largest tank was a 180g with a 12-13" Parachromis Dovii, I was always into big cichlids. Not having room to keep a big FW tank I decided to get back into reefing. This tank will be a year old in a few weeks, and I'll have been back into reefing for about two years in October.

Since coming back while being inundated with biology courses, I always strive to look at things from a biological point of view. VERY OFTEN, I've found this to contradict many things I knew about the hobby from before. So coming back to the hobby has made me think of things in a MUCH more critical way, and even more annoyingly, has made me settle upon the notion that many aspects of this hobby are unknown to us. As you could probably tell by what i try and post, and how I try to display my arguments, this is something that even bothers me. I like answers.

So there you go @jda -- I don't like to argue, and since we've fought more than once I figured it couldn't hurt to explain a little about me, how I see things, and how I try to approach things.

You are always welcome to come into my build thread and ask me anything you want, why I'm doing this, or why I'm doing that, or what my thoughts are on X, Y or Z.

ritter6788 · Sep 29, 2017

No way to compare a reef tank to the ocean. Ever go diving or snorkeling? I'm guessing if you checked the phosphates there it would be very low but there is "stuff" floating in the water everywhere. Difference is that most of that stuff is live in the ocean and it's dead/decaying matter in a tank. What is dead/dying in the ocean is diluted beyond measure since the reef is a tiny fraction of the ocean water volume compared to a tank that has a full ecosystem pack inside.

Graffiti Spot · Sep 30, 2017

I agree with jda. But also notice that a lot of people these days think that if their tank drops to clear on a salifert test or 0 on a phosphate checker their corals will suddenly die or stress. That doesn't happen, given your feeding your fish in a normal fashion, which most anyone with a true reef tank does, and given your not actively trying to continue to drive nutrients farther down. Eventually if your not feeding or if your lights are not being used correctly things will begin to pale and or stress. Us reefers that have been in it for a while used to run our tanks like this for years and many, many incredible systems have come from it.
I have seen a trend of newer reefers reading about how 0 nutrients is bad and could be a death sentence, and also noticed they don't tend to read further into it to understand the whole story. The lighting plays a huge part in this conversation as well. Nutrients and lighting need to be in tune with each other.