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Quick photo for you guys... This Pink Sand Dollar Porites has had some serious growth and polyp extension lately!
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That looks happy!Quick photo for you guys... This Pink Sand Dollar Montipora (maybe porites?) has had some serious growth and polyp extension lately!
how is everything going and how is the dino battle?
Exactly.....you'll naturally have to feed more....a lot more if you're adding multiple new fish all at once. So a bloom could be expected.....best if it's not a bloom of just dino's again. So give "everything else" in the tank a good shot to get re-established.
0.10 ppm PO4 ought to be your minimum (≥ 0.10 ppm) until this is all a distant memory. That level has proven to suppress any blooming tendency they have.
The good thing is that there's nothing wrong with levels that high! You just have to mange NO3 and PO4 more like you manage alkalinity – keep minimum levels in mind that you dose up from vs trying to suppress levels of either one.
Once the recovery is back under way, and as long as you take your time with increases, you can raise feeding rates until dosing won't matter as much and maybe you could even stop. (feeding rates ≠ feeding quantity) Automating some of your feeding would be a great idea to maximize stability by spreading feedings out throughout the day. Again, this is not intended to increase overall feeding....let an auto-feeder do part of what you're doing already. If you do want to increase the total quantity of food going in, do it as gradually as you can.
I'd want a nice crop of algae – real, healthy, fuzzy green algae!!!! – growing before I worried about cutting off the P and N supply though. Try to let your CUC do most of the management....well-fed algae should be very edible.
@zachxlutz as long as you can continue daily testing, I would add 1 mL onto your dose every day until you come back to test and get 0.10 ppm. No dose needed. Then scale back to a maintenance dose the next day, according to whatever test results dictate.
It takes a boatload of N and P to break down the leftover detritus from old dino cells!!!
Gravel vacuuming during a water change should help by directly removing at least some of the dead dino's.
Otherwise, keep upping the dose until you see signs that most of that detritus is broken down. (Either your macro will start growing (faster) or you'll notice N and/or P start to accumulate.)
Personally I'd take out the macro until the nutrient situation feels more under control. At this point it's working against you more that it's helping. (A short term maneuver.)