Starting With 0 Nutrients then Dosing

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

do you have any experience with dosing ammonium?

There are a number of threads on it. IMO, it's observable benefits over nitrate dosing are not clearly demonstrated

This thread has a recipe:

DIY ammonia dosing for low N systems

See the thread here: https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/diy-ammonia-dosing-for-low-nitrate-systems.987087/

www.reef2reef.com

 

[TheSheff]

There are a number of threads on it. IMO, it's observable benefits over nitrate dosing are not clearly demonstrated

This thread has a recipe:

DIY ammonia dosing for low N systems

See the thread here: https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/diy-ammonia-dosing-for-low-nitrate-systems.987087/

www.reef2reef.com

I’ve read through your articles on ammonia dosing and it seems like something cool to try. What kind of benefits could we potentially receive from it? Better colors? Better growth?

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

I’ve read through your articles on ammonia dosing and it seems like something cool to try. What kind of benefits could we potentially receive from it? Better colors? Better growth?

Could be no difference at all. My best guess is it gives the corals a little more energy, but I do not know what they might do with it, if anything.

 

[Pod_01]

Proven by whom? Their marketing and advertisement section? While your ability to use the camera to shoot pictures of your tank may be impressive, it tells nothing about the quality of TM products.
I mean if it works for you fine, but you really should check the ingredients a company uses before you praise this company for its used ingredients. Else you may sound like a fool.

Just a short search tells me TM uses fish meal (usually butcher waste products) and wheat (bread?) in O-Megavital.
Sooooo no difference to other companies.

I am quite sure I am not a fool and I do recommend that perhaps you re-read what I wrote down!!! Just because we are on a forums it doesn’t mean you can be rude… I respect you so the same courtesy should be returned. If not please do not comment on my posts.

So to clarify I like TM products and there are enough users on Reef2Reef to show that the products work and have been working for the past 20+ years. The company has proven track record. Further both Lou Ekus and Hans Werner (inventor of Balling method) from TM constantly contribute and educate the R2R users.

As for the fish and coral food I did write that I use Fauna Marin and not Tropic Marin. Fauna Marin does not equal Tropic marine, yes both are from Germany.
Here is what I use for food:

Please let me know if there is bread? If there is I need to find alternative food source.
Also FM has a large coral farm, so their products have proven track record as well from users and the farm.

A tip of a day, to get beautiful reef pictures you need to start with clean reef tank. The camera and skills are not required, I have zero picture taking skills.

Happy reefing…. and be courteous.

 

[Tavero]

do you have any experience with dosing ammonium?

Right now I am dosing a mix of ammoniumchloride and calciumnitrate.
33% NH4Cl and 66% CaNO3 by weight. That way half of the nirogen comes from ammonium and half from nitrate (molecular weight of ammoniumchloride is roughly half of calciumnitrate). I am still experimenting with the results, but i like it so far.

All thanks to @Randy Holmes-Farley and his forum post about different nitrogen sources a few weeks ago. I am also trying Amino acids as nitrogen sources but can't see a lot of reaction from my corals until now.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

So to clarify I like TM products and there are enough users on Reef2Reef to show that the products work and have been working for the past 20+ years. The company has proven track record. Further both Lou Ekus and Hans Werner (inventor of Balling method) from TM constantly contribute and educate the R2R users.

To some extent I agree with you, but I'd also note that neither TM nor any other hobby company shows actual data demonstrating the benefit of their product over alternatives.

Then it comes down to trust. I do trust Tropic Marin to not make the truly bogus claims some other companies do, but that also does not mean their approach to a situation is the best/cheapest/easiest. That is where user testing and/or composition knowledge have to come in.

 

[Tavero]

I am quite sure I am not a fool and I do recommend that perhaps you re-read what I wrote down!!! Just because we are on a forums it doesn’t mean you can be rude… I respect you so the same courtesy should be returned. If not please do not comment on my posts.

So to clarify I like TM products and there are enough users on Reef2Reef to show that the products work and have been working for the past 20+ years. The company has proven track record. Further both Lou Ekus and Hans Werner (inventor of Balling method) from TM constantly contribute and educate the R2R users.

As for the fish and coral food I did write that I use Fauna Marin and not Tropic Marin. Fauna Marin does not equal Tropic marine, yes both are from Germany.
Here is what I use for food:

Please let me know if there is bread? If there is I need to find alternative food source.
Also FM has a large coral farm, so their products have proven track record as well from users and the farm.

A tip of a day, to get beautiful reef pictures you need to start with clean reef tank. The camera and skills are not required, I have zero picture taking skills.

Happy reefing…. and be courteous.

I was never rude in my opinion. Just critical and frank with you. Some people need a push to rethink their opinion. And your post did sound a bit like a sales pitch.

OK ill bite and ask. You are talking about bread again. But i don't recall ever seeing actual bread in the ingredient list of any fish food. I am curious to know if such a product exists.

It seems like amazon tried to recommend me O-Megavital even though its from another company. I didn't double check so it seem it's jeff bezos that made a fool out of me with this one. My Bad.
This doesn't change my criticism i have with the Fauna Marine product line to begin with though (our original topic). The listed ingredience are very sparse. Their liquid foods don't list the used preservatives. Their additive solutions don't list the used additives, and one of their older LPS food i am still using, doesn't have an ingredient list at all.

 

[TheSheff]

Could be no difference at all. My best guess is it gives the corals a little more energy, but I do not know what they might do with it, if anything.

lol we all could use a little bit more energy I guess

 

[jda]

I do tend to trust TM as much as any company, but they have had many products over the years that are now gone from the hobby.

I would avoid arguments that center around X number of great tanks use this or that. There are always a larger number of tanks that do not.

I do dose ammonium in fish less tanks - I use Janitorial strength from ACE hardware. I will probably buy some more pure powder next time, but I rarely have tanks without fish.

There are many articles out there about bacteria feeding true coral (skeleton leavers). Most are caught in their slime coats, directly assimilated and are terrestrial based that get into the water column. These are not typically the ones that multiply with OC, although the could. True coral do not have the capability to catch and digest bacteria in their polyps with any success - NPS and some softies are different, but these are not true coral to scientists even though they are all coral to us. The idea that TM is feeding bacteria to feed coral feels like a reach to me - if they defined what type of coral and what type of bacteria, then somebody could dig in. They could even supply some research to be viewed without giving away their formula.

 

[TheSheff]

Could be no difference at all. My best guess is it gives the corals a little more energy, but I do not know what they might do with it, if anything.

do you think the ability of our tanks to process the ammonia dosing could depend on the age of the tank?

 

[jda]

If you can feed a good amount of fish a few times a day, then you can handle .1 ppm of ammonia. If your tank is mature enough to chew up nitrates and keep them low to where you don't like a number on a test kit, then you likely have a good population of anaerobic bacteria that also requires a good population of aerobic bacteria or organisms to use up the nh4.

Oh, there are some "corals" and other tank inhabitants that cannot get nitrogen from nitrate. You probably should dose ammonia for them. Only the ones that can convert nitrate to get nitrogen can save the energy. Lasse laid out some of these things in the long nitrate thread in the Chemistry forum, but you can search for them too.

 

[Pod_01]

I was never rude in my opinion. Just critical and frank with you. Some people need a push to rethink their opinion. And your post did sound a bit like a sales pitch.

OK ill bite and ask. You are talking about bread again. But i don't recall ever seeing actual bread in the ingredient list of any fish food. I am curious to know if such a product exists.

It seems like amazon tried to recommend me O-Megavital even though its from another company. I didn't double check so it seem it's jeff bezos that made a fool out of me with this one. My Bad.
This doesn't change my criticism i have with the Fauna Marine product line to begin with though (our original topic). The listed ingredience are very sparse. Their liquid foods don't list the used preservatives. Their additive solutions don't list the used additives, and one of their older LPS food i am still using, doesn't have an ingredient list at all.

Hmmmmm…. What to say.
I am not American but I speak English and two other languages.

Where I come from you do not call people you do not know fools. Maybe your pals but I am not one of them.

Since reefing is a hobby and a way for me to relax from very stressful job I honest don’t have time nor energy to engage in non productive discussion.

Just to clarify I don’t sell anything nor provide any services nor do I really want to convince anyone to do anything so I definitely do not need to be polite or tolerate someone who is rude.

Obviously you have axe to grind and I am staying out of it.

You enjoy your day and happy reefing to the rest.

Few more pictures to lighten up the day or evening:

 

[Pod_01]

I do tend to trust TM as much as any company, but they have had many products over the years that are now gone from the hobby.

I would avoid arguments that center around X number of great tanks use this or that. There are always a larger number of tanks that do not.

I do dose ammonium in fish less tanks - I use Janitorial strength from ACE hardware. I will probably buy some more pure powder next time, but I rarely have tanks without fish.

There are many articles out there about bacteria feeding true coral (skeleton leavers). Most are caught in their slime coats, directly assimilated and are terrestrial based that get into the water column. These are not typically the ones that multiply with OC, although the could. True coral do not have the capability to catch and digest bacteria in their polyps with any success - NPS and some softies are different, but these are not true coral to scientists even though they are all coral to us. The idea that TM is feeding bacteria to feed coral feels like a reach to me - if they defined what type of coral and what type of bacteria, then somebody could dig in. They could even supply some research to be viewed without giving away their formula.

I like to understand this further. I am referring to the mechanism how corals obtain the N and P building blocks. So my understanding and this can be simplistic (I am not chemist or biologist) is that corals can easily absorb N. They have good mechanisms for this and generally the correct N comes from fish. On the other hand corals are not so good with P. My understanding is they cannot use PO4 or other forms directly but capture it with help of bacteria. As in bacteria can consume it and corals in turn obtain it from the bacteria that is in the slime coat, maybe capture it etc…
Also P comes from fish poop that corals can get, assuming there is fish or plankton (maybe).
Is this remotely correct?
From my experience P is really important to SPS and that is no longer opinion for me, zero P equal dead corals.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

My understanding is they cannot use PO4 or other forms directly but capture it with help of bacteria.

What is the evidence for that? I don't think it is likely to be true.

Evidence suggests they may well get a lot of their P from particulates when P is very low and particulates are higher (as on many coral reefs), but in reef tanks with higher phosphate and lower particulates, I've not seen evidence they cannot get P perfectly well from inorganic orthophosphate.

For example:

High phosphate uptake requirements of the scleractinian coral Stylophora pistillata

SUMMARYSeveral untested aspects of the regulation of inorganic nutrient uptake were examined using nutrient depletion experiments with the symbiotic coral Stylophora pistillata. The total inhibition of phosphate uptake in artificial seawater lacking sodium indicates the involvement of a...

journals.biologists.com

Several untested aspects of the regulation of inorganic nutrient uptake were examined using nutrient depletion experiments with the symbiotic coral Stylophora pistillata. The total inhibition of phosphate uptake in artificial seawater lacking sodium indicates the involvement of a sodium/phosphate symporter for the uptake of phosphate across host membranes. Addition of ammonium or nitrate (up to 6.0 μmol l–1) did not enhance saturated phosphate uptake rates, thus indicating that corals, or their symbiotic algae, were not, or not sufficiently, nitrogen limited to modify their phosphate needs. Conversely, the saturated uptake rate of ammonium increased by 2.5-fold in the presence of 3.0 μmol l–1 of phosphate, thus indicating that the corals or their symbionts were lacking intracellular phosphate to take advantage of the inorganic nitrogen compounds dissolved in their surrounding medium. Overall, these results highlight some greater limitation in phosphate rather than in nitrogen. Finally, the rate of phosphate uptake decreased with particulate feeding of the host (organic phosphate source). Indeed, corals that were fed 1 and 3 days before the uptake experiment took up phosphate 42 and 19% slower, respectively, than corals that were fed 21 days before. This result provides additional evidence of phosphate limitation in S. pistillata. This study therefore brings new insights into the relationships between nutrients and symbiotic corals, and may provide a rapid and effective tool to investigate which nutrient is the most limiting for coral metabolism.

 

[Pod_01]

What is the evidence for that? I don't think it is likely to be true.

Evidence suggests they may well get a lot of their P from particulates when P is very low and particulates are higher (as on many coral reefs), but in reef tanks with higher phosphate and lower particulates, I've not seen evidence they cannot get P perfectly well from inorganic orthophosphate.

For example:

High phosphate uptake requirements of the scleractinian coral Stylophora pistillata

SUMMARYSeveral untested aspects of the regulation of inorganic nutrient uptake were examined using nutrient depletion experiments with the symbiotic coral Stylophora pistillata. The total inhibition of phosphate uptake in artificial seawater lacking sodium indicates the involvement of a...

journals.biologists.com

Several untested aspects of the regulation of inorganic nutrient uptake were examined using nutrient depletion experiments with the symbiotic coral Stylophora pistillata. The total inhibition of phosphate uptake in artificial seawater lacking sodium indicates the involvement of a sodium/phosphate symporter for the uptake of phosphate across host membranes. Addition of ammonium or nitrate (up to 6.0 μmol l–1) did not enhance saturated phosphate uptake rates, thus indicating that corals, or their symbiotic algae, were not, or not sufficiently, nitrogen limited to modify their phosphate needs. Conversely, the saturated uptake rate of ammonium increased by 2.5-fold in the presence of 3.0 μmol l–1 of phosphate, thus indicating that the corals or their symbionts were lacking intracellular phosphate to take advantage of the inorganic nitrogen compounds dissolved in their surrounding medium. Overall, these results highlight some greater limitation in phosphate rather than in nitrogen. Finally, the rate of phosphate uptake decreased with particulate feeding of the host (organic phosphate source). Indeed, corals that were fed 1 and 3 days before the uptake experiment took up phosphate 42 and 19% slower, respectively, than corals that were fed 21 days before. This result provides additional evidence of phosphate limitation in S. pistillata. This study therefore brings new insights into the relationships between nutrients and symbiotic corals, and may provide a rapid and effective tool to investigate which nutrient is the most limiting for coral metabolism.

Randy thank you for the explanation I will chew on it for few weeks or months. I think I am getting there slowly, reefing is a part time gig. The chemistry and biology takes time to digest.

But I do have to ask probably silly question.
When you and articles talk about P, is that P or is that PO4 or other form of P. From ICP I get:

So now I scratch my head, P is reactive so likely not in water. The Ortho-Phosphate I believe we measure with test kits but corals don’t use it (I can be wrong here) also I believe this it the one people tend to add to the tank, last there is the organic and I suspect that is the one being discussed. What you quoted also talks about organic phosphate.

I suspect soon I can graduate to grade 1 from Senior kindergarten .

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

IMO, corals can use inorganic orthophosphate, PO4- - - . They may also take up other forms, and may prefer them in some scenarios since they may be easier to attain (as from particulates). Almost everyone dosing phosphate doses inorganic orthophosphate. When you feed more, you get both inorganic orthophosphate excreted by fish and other organisms, as well as some organic forms (which is comprides by large number of low concentration molecules).

ICP measures all forms of P, but it is generally unlikely that these other forms are high enough to dominate the results unless P overall is very low.

In your case, you can see that the total phosphate (0.13) calculated from the ICP measure of P (0.044) and inorganic measured photometric orthophosphate (0.11) are nearly identical (0.13 ~ 0.11) and I expect the difference is within test error , but it is possible that some organic P is in the 0.13 and not in the 0.11.

 

[Tavero]

Hmmmmm…. What to say.
I am not American but I speak English and two other languages.

Where I come from you do not call people you do not know fools. Maybe your pals but I am not one of them.

Since reefing is a hobby and a way for me to relax from very stressful job I honest don’t have time nor energy to engage in non productive discussion.

Just to clarify I don’t sell anything nor provide any services nor do I really want to convince anyone to do anything so I definitely do not need to be polite or tolerate someone who is rude.

Obviously you have axe to grind and I am staying out of it.

You enjoy your day and happy reefing to the rest.

Few more pictures to lighten up the day or evening:

I did NOT call you a fool.
"making a fool out ouf yourself" is an idom that means: behave in a way that makes other people think that you are acting silly or lack in good judgment.
English is also not my main language but this is an english forum so i will use my whole vocabulary. If this idom was enough to offend you, maybe the Internet isn't the right place for you.
Nowadays some are so easily offended its crazy.

 

[Timfish]

Hello, I was just reading through a thread about nutrients and read that someone uses a fuge and skimmer to almost constantly keep their nutrients at 0, then they dose what nutrients are needed with plus NP. Has anyone done this with any success? It seems like it would be nice to be able to control nutrient numbers pretty precisely so that they are always where we want them to be.

One problem I see with this approach is there's a whole lot more going on in our systems than we can test for and focusing on just a few test results is missing the big picture. Another issue I've seen over the decades is the more complex a system is to maintian the harder it is to keep maintaining it long term and as these system should live decades if not centuries, consistancy and ease of maintenance should be major considerations.

As there's been some discussion on phosphorus this schematic from this paper on phosphorus metabolism in corals is one example of how much more complex things are than what a simple test will show us:

 

[jda]

There are articles that indicate that most true corals, and anenomes, prefer other forms of phosphorous than from orthophosphate. None of them have said that they cannot use orthophosphate. There is a three day windows in one accidental experiment where metaphosphate turns into orthophosphate - never seen any tests anywhere with any knowledge on this. Metaphosphate seems preferred since it is often bound to other things that the host can use to clean house (bind something else to and export), or in some other thing. There are not a lot of studies on this and a few of them needed to be translated, so who knows if any of it is true. I tend to believe it since while GFO seems to harm corals since it can bind many types of phosphates (meta and ortho), LC does not seem to harm corals by binding ortho - this is all anecdotal/observational, but it does line up.

Mature tanks with a wide variety of organisms do have bacteria and other microfauna that can be caught in the slime coats of true coral and assimilated without much energy. Larger colonies have the math advantage over frags. I am talking about tanks with ocean-like fauna and not things just from a bottle, most likely.

All evidence suggests that all corals can also get nitrogen from these organisms that they assimilate and also easily from ammonium. Not all seem to be able to use nitrate for nitrogen, but the ones that do have to use energy to convert it that nobody seems to know the exact amount - estimated in the 30-70% range. Because some things cannot use no3 at all, I would never dose no3 to help corals and only if you want to growth limit dinos or cyano or something like that. To each their own.

You have to kinda separate out the folks who tell you that their tanks and corals are awesome because they have no3 and po4 at pretty high levels. It was likely that the feedings that got the higher no3 and po4 levels is what did the work, not just having those levels.

 

[TheSheff]

One problem I see with this approach is there's a whole lot more going on in our systems than we can test for and focusing on just a few test results is missing the big picture. Another issue I've seen over the decades is the more complex a system is to maintian the harder it is to keep maintaining it long term and as these system should live decades if not centuries, consistancy and ease of maintenance should be major considerations.

As there's been some discussion on phosphorus this schematic from this paper on phosphorus metabolism in corals is one example of how much more complex things are than what a simple test will show us:

Yes I've done more research since I posted this thread on how corals receive their energy. It seems like the nitrification process and many others related to nutrients play a part in why they receive nutrition. This would all be missing if we only dosed N&P.