I´ve been questioning myself a lot lately: do we really need to replenish all those traces? Do we really need to keep our water as close as we can to sea water?
Long ago there were lots of thriving tanks while nobody even knew or talked about trace elements, many were R2R amazing featured reefs. Many were kept with very few or no water changes, just replenishing calcium, alkalinity and often magnesium.
Recently people talk a lot about keeping aquarium water exactly like ocean water. My doubt is, is all that essential for coral? Are we feeding anything else?
It is a fact that algae thrives in healthy coral reefs in the ocean... It is also a fact that mature reefs are much easier to keep and most of the time (not always of course) and show a much less algae problems. It seems that coming to equilibrium in terms of microbiology is very important; could this be it all about that?
Have we ever questioned if the subtraction of certain elements could actually be beneficial for what we aim in our reef tanks? One simple example of that: dinoflagellates blooms. One method that helps controlling them is just avoiding water changes, stop dosing traces and doing frequent manual removal of concentrated dinos in some areas. With that method we might be removing important ions for dino metabolism and disfavoring their growth (not talking here about best methods, just one method that has been used with or without others over the years).
Could, maybe, those mature thriving reefs lack some elements from repeated removal of nuisance algae and lack of replenishment? Could that subtraction from the water actually benefit the animals we aim to keep in this closed environment?
No doubt we need to keep our main parameters as stable as possible, but I´ve been questioning myself a lot if we really need to care so much about all elements, those ICPs details, single elements dosing...
It seems there are many important elements that we should replenish, and many of those are not even traces, like potassium, iron, iodine, and manganese for example, but do we really need to dose all the other traces?
Keeping water is like keeping the air we breathe, but we do not need those 78% nitrogen available for important metabolic functions, in this case it just occupies some space. Could the same be true for some of the traces we call important?
I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic.
Long ago there were lots of thriving tanks while nobody even knew or talked about trace elements, many were R2R amazing featured reefs. Many were kept with very few or no water changes, just replenishing calcium, alkalinity and often magnesium.
Recently people talk a lot about keeping aquarium water exactly like ocean water. My doubt is, is all that essential for coral? Are we feeding anything else?
It is a fact that algae thrives in healthy coral reefs in the ocean... It is also a fact that mature reefs are much easier to keep and most of the time (not always of course) and show a much less algae problems. It seems that coming to equilibrium in terms of microbiology is very important; could this be it all about that?
Have we ever questioned if the subtraction of certain elements could actually be beneficial for what we aim in our reef tanks? One simple example of that: dinoflagellates blooms. One method that helps controlling them is just avoiding water changes, stop dosing traces and doing frequent manual removal of concentrated dinos in some areas. With that method we might be removing important ions for dino metabolism and disfavoring their growth (not talking here about best methods, just one method that has been used with or without others over the years).
Could, maybe, those mature thriving reefs lack some elements from repeated removal of nuisance algae and lack of replenishment? Could that subtraction from the water actually benefit the animals we aim to keep in this closed environment?
No doubt we need to keep our main parameters as stable as possible, but I´ve been questioning myself a lot if we really need to care so much about all elements, those ICPs details, single elements dosing...
It seems there are many important elements that we should replenish, and many of those are not even traces, like potassium, iron, iodine, and manganese for example, but do we really need to dose all the other traces?
Keeping water is like keeping the air we breathe, but we do not need those 78% nitrogen available for important metabolic functions, in this case it just occupies some space. Could the same be true for some of the traces we call important?
I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic.