Lost half of SPS. Lesson learned after 10 years in reefing...cause and effect. Guess what caused it

Kato · Sep 4, 2023

Also here's a theory:

If your easy to keep SPS (birdnest, monty) show STN first. Look at PO4. Trust no-one. Including Hanna.

Kato · Sep 4, 2023

jda said:
I don't think that there is a single organism alive that needs phosphate po4 - they need phosphorous P. There are many sources of phosphorous in a reef tank and phosphate is just one of them. There are also many kinds of phosphate and most of us can only test for one of them - orthophosphate.

I can't argue against this. But I know what I'm seeing. The low readings on Hanna (and even lower on ICP) _was_ the culprit for my tank.

jda · Sep 4, 2023

If you ICP test does actual total phosphorous, instead of calculated, then this will likely be a higher level. Most ICP do not actually do this, but do a calculation which is worthless. Unless ortho test bottomed out due to lack of feeding, fishless/fallow tank, etc. then it was not likely low po4... but it could have been something else that also lowered po4.

Kato · Sep 4, 2023

Second Theory:

If your easy to keep SPS start to STN, and you adjust PO4, changes are they are gone already as the bad conditions have been around for at least a month. Fragging may help. Or it may not. Use new frags to test if things improved. Don't be fooled by the SPS that are already dying. SPS rarely just turn around when things are going south....

Kato · Sep 4, 2023

jda said:
If you ICP test does actual total phosphorous, instead of calculated, then this will likely be a higher level. Most ICP do not actually do this, but do a calculation which is worthless. Unless ortho test bottomed out due to lack of feeding, fishless/fallow tank, etc. then it was not likely low po4... but it could have been something else that also lowered po4.

Good point. Yea hard to know. I can only relate to the readings the instruments I own tell me.

I said this before, but the potential for more in-depth BRS videos and investigations is enourmous.

coral reeftank · Sep 4, 2023

chipchipbro said:
Well, I can relate!
I am dosing ZeoBak and FlatWorm Stop plus I tried AcroGlow. I am also using Zeolith passively in a media basket with some siporax.

I have not tested my system alot lately as it was pretty stable. 3 or 4 days ago I tested it randomly and saw 0.01 po4 :O usually its 0.08
and only 1.1 no3 (usually its around 10)

So, I have to add no3 and po4.. I also increased the amount of fish.

ZeoBak seems to be strong stuff! I use np bacto balance aswell..

now the question is.. what do I do? Cant raise po4 and no3 daily with a liquid solution…..

You’ll have to feed more heavily, more fish feedings, coral feedings, etc. Try to stay away from dosing additional aminos and work on adding as much raw food ingredients. A good frozen fish food and high quality dried food. This in theory should also help with trace elements as as a quality feed should have all the required nutrients in a bioavailable form.

Toob · Sep 4, 2023

jda said:
I am going with: bad luck.

Not having po4 does not kill corals instantly, or even over a short amount of time. The acropora can keep meta/poly phosphates from fish waste to be used later. The acorpora also recycle phosphorous to keep the symbionts/zoox able to reproduce and replace themselves. A lack of phosphorous would limit growth, not cause death, at least not for a longer while. Besides, po4 is just one form of phosphorous available in a tank and perhaps the least used by acropora.

Phosphorus is not food. The corals do not need it for daily function. They need it to grow new organic tissue. Your issue with not likely anything to do with po4. If you had a total phosphorous test kit then you might have more info, but my guess is that your total P would be something along the lines of 4-6x what you measured for po4 alone.

In the end, I have no idea what caused this but it was not likely po4.

Also, doing part of Zeo has been bad news in the past. Buy in and do it all or don't do anything. Picking and choosing has caused issues for many folks. Some of this is because TM is not transparent about what is what, so you just either have to trust them 100% with their black box or just stay away.

This thread was really eyeroll inducing until you came with a real perspective.

sjfishguy · Sep 4, 2023

having kept sps and acros for over 20 years, low phosphates will never kill a coral. They might not look great, but will never kill a coral. Think what you want, but that’s not the reason. Alk swing like you described is more likely the reason and it started a decline that never recovered.

chipchipbro · Sep 5, 2023

coral reeftank said:
You’ll have to feed more heavily, more fish feedings, coral feedings, etc. Try to stay away from dosing additional aminos and work on adding as much raw food ingredients. A good frozen fish food and high quality dried food. This in theory should also help with trace elements as as a quality feed should have all the required nutrients in a bioavailable form.

Well I do feed AF Liquid Mysis and Fauna Marin Fish Plankton (also liquid)
And I feed a mix of Ocean Nutrition Formula 1 and Formula 2 pellets. Sometimes I also feed some spirulina flakes as my naso loves that stuff. I need to up my food load in this case

I dont dose other aminos. I only dose Polypop and Complete Reef Food from my system Modern Reef.

Kato · Sep 5, 2023

sjfishguy said:
having kept sps and acros for over 20 years, low phosphates will never kill a coral. They might not look great, but will never kill a coral. Think what you want, but that’s not the reason. Alk swing like you described is more likely the reason and it started a decline that never recovered.

But thing is what is low to you may not be low to me. It may depend on how you test it, how much algage you have to consume it, when it consumes it. My guess is if you go crazy with the GFO over a period of time, your acro's will STN. But yes each system is different.

Dburr1014 · Sep 5, 2023

Zeovite, increasing algae light, and increase of lighting in the tank drove your nutrients to zero.

OR

You didn't calibrate your refractometer and the sg went higher than you thought.

What do I win?

Ah, I guess this has already been uncovered. LOL

OP, seems like our systems are pretty alike. Constantly getting 0 on my hanna NO3 test and 0.1 on the PO4.
Auto feed 4x a day and a homemade frozen cube at night with some added HUFA. When the Cheato slows, I up my feeding and dump some cheato.

jda · Sep 5, 2023

Biology does not work differently in one person's tank than another's. Phosphate is still a waste product and only one way to get a form of phosphorous to some organisms.

Using GFO is a different thing than having low po4. While GFO can lower po4, it also can bind other things which could be an issue. I have a mostly unsubstantiated theory on why GFO causes issues while LaCl does not, which is that the GFO might bind organic phosphorous and meta/poly phosphates along with the ortho phosphate whereas the LaCl might only bind ortho leaving the other, more usable forms of organic and poly/meta for the corals to use. GFO is also known to bind traces that LaCl does not. Many might blame lower po4, but that was not likely the issue.

I strongly suggest that you go back to the drawing board since this could happen again even if you keep the po4 higher. The death was not likely from low po4 and the killer is still on the loose.

vetteguy53081 · Sep 5, 2023

Kato said:
Hi,

Even after 10 years in reefing I learned a valuable (and expensive) lesson around SPS corals after losing roughly 50% of what I had. The whole thing is quite interesting and a good example of cause and effect so wanted to share.

Background:
So I have a Waterbox 180 documented in the this thread: https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/w...nning-after-transfer-eu.986890/#post-11402035
About 70% of stuff was moved from my reefer 350. Some details:

SPS dominated tank with:
Nyos skimmer, T5 + AI LED combo, co2 scrubber, kalkwasser, good quality Carbon in a sock (not reactor), All4Reef, Refugium with Chaeto, Full apex, trident testing, Nitrate 1-2, PO4 0.03, Alk 8, Cal 440, Mag 1400 (measred when the STN had begun).

What happened?:
Tank was doing great for 4-5 months after the move from my reefer 350. Acro's growing well, colors good, was happy. Easy to see growth weekly. Then suddenly I noticed STN from the base on the easier SPS like birdsnest. After roughly 1 month I had lost a baseball sized birdsnest (took me 3 years to grow out) and a very nice pink hystrix that was big as well. Then the other more picky Acros started to STN as well from the base up. Lost quite a few there. I also lost a plate sized green plating Monti (red one was not happy but survived)

Ok taking a step back, what did I change? What exactly did I do that caused this?
Thinking about it, within the last two months I changed the following or had the following incidents which could affect things:

I raised my salinity (34->35ppt)
I increased my LED intensity slightly (65->75%)
I changed from my old spectrum used on the reefer 350 to the AB+ that was easy to set up via the Apex MXM module
I started to tinker a bit with Zeovit. Started with ZeoBak and ZeoFood dosing twice per week
I added 2 pieces of real live rock (imported. Just dropped in tank)
Trouble dialing in Kalkwasser with a few Alk swings (8->10 and 10->8 during a 24 hour period once or twice)
I increased the scheduled for lighting my Chaeto (8->10 hours)
Foxface fish added
Added more Copepods

Which one of the above caused it you think?
Took me roughly 2 weeks to figure it out (with experiments) and tank is now back on track with great growth. It really was a surprise to me even after having quite a few of successful tanks over the years. But one does not start a 'new' tank that often and there's always stuff to learn in this hobby. I find this one to be a textbook example of only changing one thing at a time and observe is no joke. Shall let you know in a few days...

Zeovit which caused me headache and alk swing

Kato · Sep 6, 2023

jda said:
I strongly suggest that you go back to the drawing board since this could happen again even if you keep the po4 higher. The death was not likely from low po4 and the killer is still on the loose.

I shall keep looking but doubt I will come to other conclusions. But will be extra focussed on it in the next few months.

Koty · Sep 6, 2023

Did not read carefully all the threads. My theory, and thus my 0.02, is that the problem lies in the fact that you do not have a UV. A problem may arise when the concentration of opportunistic bacteria can rise beyond the capacity of the coral immune system. Once one coral gets infected, the concentration of these bacteria starts to increase even faster. Think of UV as the artificial replacement for the sun UV.
Cheato takes a lot of trace elements from the water column. I noticed that based on very rapid growth after I started adding the TM A and K elements regularly. This has less of an effect on corals if you feed them occasionally.

Kato · Sep 6, 2023

Koty said:
Did not read carefully all the threads. My theory, and thus my 0.02, is that the problem lies in the fact that you do not have a UV. A problem may arise when the concentration of opportunistic bacteria can rise beyond the capacity of the coral immune system. Once one coral gets infected, the concentration of these bacteria starts to increase even faster. Think of UV as the artificial replacement for the sun UV.
Cheato takes a lot of trace elements from the water column. I noticed that based on very rapid growth after I started adding the TM A and K elements regularly. This has less of an effect on corals if you feed them occasionally.

Yeah I did start to dose chatogrow as well. It was after I had losses. But I had water changes, so doubt traces were all depleted (Chaeto grew extremely well after I added Zeofood due to increased nitrogen)

UV..good question. Many many successful thanks have run without UV for many years.

We need to find better ways to 'prove' what the culprit of some incident is. Its still way too anecdotal. Perhaps some kind of online 'handbook/wiki-page' of 'if you see this, check that and do this'. Iterate over it constantly, perhaps vote for solutions to each 'problem' every 3 months.

Koty · Sep 6, 2023

Kato said:
Yeah I did start to dose chatogrow as well. It was after I had losses. But I had water changes, so doubt traces were all depleted (Chaeto grew extremely well after I added Zeofood due to increased nitrogen)

UV..good question. Many many successful thanks have run without UV for many years.

We need to find better ways to 'prove' what the culprit of some incident is. Its still way too anecdotal.

Water change is not an efficient means to replenish trace elements. Many of them "get lost" very rapidly via many mechanisms. So trace elements should be dosed regularly.
I read many "UV kills the microbiome in your water column" posts. Shutting down my UV ended up killing two Euphilias that looked great for many months within several days (I have a lot of heavily fed fish, so my tank has a high input and output flux of organics). I have a relatively strong UV with a weak flow, so unicellular organisms do not live to see the other side of it.

Dburr1014 · Sep 6, 2023

Koty said:
Water change is not an efficient means to replenish trace elements. Many of them "get lost" very rapidly via many mechanisms. So trace elements should be dosed regularly.
I read many "UV kills the microbiome in your water column" posts. Shutting down my UV ended up killing two Euphilias that looked great for many months within several days (I have a lot of heavily fed fish, so my tank has a high input and output flux of organics). I have a relatively strong UV with a weak flow, so unicellular organisms do not live to see the other side of it.

I have to disagree. Trace elements are a great way to replenish I have always read.
I could probably find many many more coral farmers written articles that state the same. https://tidalgardens.com/articles/c...weekly 10,trace element supplement could help.
And UV I have only run during my dinos event. That equates to running < 1 year on my 10 yo system.
I do agree it has its benefits but it's not for everyone and I don't think it "replaces the sun" as you claim.

Koty · Sep 6, 2023

I respect the Tidal Garden guy, but some trace elements disappear from the water column much too fast for 10% weekly WC. It has no apparent adverse effect because corals, for example, get their trace elements from fish food directly or indirectly.
"I don't think it "replaces the sun" as you claim."
In making this analogy, I only referred to the sterilization effect of direct sunlight UV on sea-level seawater surface. I guess UV systems in setups like mine are much harsher due to UVA (most of which is absorbed by the atmosphere) and the long dwell time.
I would carefully generalize that I have many heavily fed fish, and that makes UV a must if you want to have corals.