SteveT's 600Gs (tons of pics!!)

SynDen

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Welcome back!!! Looking forward to seeing the revival of the tank!
 

SteveT

Butterfly Fish
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I like that phyto set up!
Thanks! I started with the 2 gal glass jars beneath then upgraded to the 3 gal plastic car boys, which are much easier to deal with. I am culturing Tisochrisis, Tetraselmis, and Rhodomonas (brown,green,red). I learned a lot from top shelf aquatics YouTube series with their in-house phyto specialist. Long story short, I think daily dosage of LIVE phtyo is a game changer from a nutrition standpoint, especially for corals, but even for fish.

I put tons of this stuff in my tank and have seen nothing but beneficial results the main very obvious one is the explosion of diverse copopods everywhere i look.

I am in the process of starting up something of an aquaculture business and plan on selling it soon!

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kchristensen8064

Sting ray
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Thanks! I started with the 2 gal glass jars beneath then upgraded to the 3 gal plastic car boys, which are much easier to deal with. I am culturing Tisochrisis, Tetraselmis, and Rhodomonas (brown,green,red). I learned a lot from top shelf aquatics YouTube series with their in-house phyto specialist. Long story short, I think daily dosage of LIVE phtyo is a game changer from a nutrition standpoint, especially for corals, but even for fish.

I put tons of this stuff in my tank and have seen nothing but beneficial results the main very obvious one is the explosion of diverse copopods everywhere i look.

I am in the process of starting up something of an aquaculture business and plan on selling it soon!

Sent from my SM-S918U using Tapatalk
I tried getting something similar going and it did not go well for me, what light are you using for your phyto?
 

Dr.DiSilicate

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well turns out having a kid took up a little more off my time than anticipated for the last 10 years or so. Lack of good husbandry Along with some discouraging things that happened left the tank sitting relatively empty for several years (basically just the purple tang). But my daughter is much more independent and I have found a renewed passion for the hobby so over the last 3 months i have turned the tank around! Sending in ICP tests, dosing trace elements, balancing alk,calc,mag, removing algae, scraping coralline off the front (it was completely covered) new invert clean up crew along with a new tang gang.

I also started a 25g lagoon coral tank so I could start the coral collection right away while the big tank gets settled. Which it pretty much has just gotten there as the last icp test came in good and all other parameters that I test have been stable and I have been adding coral over the last couple weeks.
What does your trace element regime look like? Are you using a general trace element system and then tweaking some specific stuff after the icp test? Or are you doing moonshiners? Not sure I’m going down that road but some sort of trace element dosing seems smart. I have mostly counted on water changes taking care of things but I’m interested.

Keeping in mind I think for sooo long before making any real changes. Haha


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What does your trace element regime look like? Are you using a general trace element system and then tweaking some specific stuff after the icp test? Or are you doing moonshiners? Not sure I’m going down that road but some sort of trace element dosing seems smart. I have mostly counted on water changes taking care of things but I’m interested.

Keeping in mind I think for sooo long before making any real changes. Haha


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I've really been liking monthly triton icps and making a master solution with captiv8, chris wood is super helpful over email if you have any questions on the elements. You will be surprised how low a lot of stuff actually is, waterchanges don't do s*** for supplementing trace. All of salts I've tested freshly mixed have different deficiencies as well. The method is obviously a hot topic and a lot of people messing around with it but personally doing it for a couple years on dozens of tanks I like it. If you are looking for something to mess around with I think its worthwhile, I do not recommend the all in one solutions as I've noticed when I used a few different ones a couple elements always end up overdosed especially iodine.

Here are my ideal numbers and what I'm shooting for each month, recommend looking at fauna marins library for each element. Great information on what the element does, how much is too high or too low how to recognize that etc.
 

jda123

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Don't worry about iodine. Neither OES nor MS can tell which type of idoine was in the water and only Iodide is useful... Organic Iodine, elemental iodine, iodide, iodate, I++, shineola, etc. and all of the other forms show the same peak on ICP, but they are not useful. The compound matters, not the element, which is true of most things which is why ICP often has more questions than answers. My point is that it is not likely that iodine is overdosed, just in a form that is measured but not active.

If you are feeding your fish a wide variety of food, and enough of it, there are likely enough traces in it to supplement something like a CaRx or other way to get the macro elements. This includes iodide. Most of those elements do not have a known useful set point in marine aquaria that people other than supplement sellers can agree upon.

There are some massive ICP and trace threads on r2r with the organic chemists like Bingman, Dr RHF, including Cristoph who owns Oceamo, that outline what you really need to be looking for. Most things that come back in a test that are useful are done with titration, conductivity and stuff and not so much the ICP. A definate rabbit-hole, but a good read. In the end, you end up questioning everything that anybody knows about anything beyond probably 6 parameters.
 

SteveT

Butterfly Fish
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I tried getting something similar going and it did not go well for me, what light are you using for your phyto?
I am using a simple grow light led from home depot it has reds blues and whites, which i think covers enough of what the phyto needs. A good amount of aeration is important as well, but not so much that the bubbles start skimming out the phyto.

I think the biggest factor that will crash a culture is contamination. You need fresh made saltwater in a clean bucket, and all vessels and tubing need to be sterilized and rinsed to insure there are no other bacteria or mold cells that will out compete/kill the phyto.

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SteveT

Butterfly Fish
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What does your trace element regime look like? Are you using a general trace element system and then tweaking some specific stuff after the icp test? Or are you doing moonshiners? Not sure I’m going down that road but some sort of trace element dosing seems smart. I have mostly counted on water changes taking care of things but I’m interested.

Keeping in mind I think for sooo long before making any real changes. Haha


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I used to use kalk and tropic marin cation and anion trace elements. I am now trying to replace the individual trace dosing and, to some degree, the kalk with "all for reef". My plan is to do monthly icp testing and dose anything individually that is bottoming out. Because I run a large cryptic refugium with a lot of macro and mangroves I have been dosing chaeto grow to keep the elements the plant matter consumes from bottoming out. Since I started doing this, the growth on my macros had increased significantly.

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