thats odd advice inverted. there are "formulas" for a successful reef tank...its not all smoke, mirrors and magic. everyones tank is a little different but many of the basic principals are the same. his thread was to get ideas and advice not to muddy the waters.
LMAO, your saying that telling someone, if something doesn't work, don't assume you should continue to do it, just because a bunch of talking heads on the internet say to, is "odd advice".
Okay dude.
I also think it's a bit funny that your telling me that "its not all smoke, mirrors and magic" though. I've always gone out of my way to try to understand and explain what is going on in a system. You said that if "the nutrients were too low, you would more likely see faded colors, no growth, maybe stn and your lps would have issues also." Do you have evidence of that? why do corals do so well in the ocean then LOL? and why then, do you think that the issue is too much filtration? I'm certainly not the one that looks at a reef as a black box that can not be explained. I do realize that there are things we do not understand though and every system is different though.
When someone says "I feed Phyto, Oyster eggs, Coral vitalizer (Zeo) Amino acids, mysis and pods. This event seemed to kick off when I added a batch of live mysis and some other live pods. At the same time, I started polhs amino acids as well." The first thing I think is not that he has "too much filtration".
Perhaps he does have too much filtration, but how are you going from " this happened after I fed a lot" to "you have too much filtration"? If you think it isn't all "smoke and mirrors" then you should be able to explain your link from a to b... right?
If his concern is that nutrients are "too low" and he's be "feeding more frequently" and things are not getting better, but are getting worse, then perhaps nutrients are not "too low" but too high
Nutrients drive algae, internal symbiotic algae and external algae, both are may stress corals. It also drives bacteria, which can destabilize the delicate balance that is the coral holobiont. When symbiosis goes awry, you get a breakdown of symbiosis and the coral is prone to opportunist pathogens, i.e. you may start to see tissue necrosis. Feeding a lot and carbon dosing probably can result in such an occurrence, in some cases and I had agreed that cutting back on carbon dosing could be worth a try. I don't agree that you should assume that, that is the case and necessarily continue to cut back on carbon dosing, if things then get worse. Things often do follow general rules. Some including myself, find that a general rule is that corals, such as acropora generally do better in environments with low dissolved nutrients and minimal algae growth. People wouldn't dose carbon sources if some did not see a benefit to the health of their systems when doing so, such as this. Things are not a black box, but they are not always so simple. Too much carbon may cause issues, but so can too much nutrients.
As described by Virgina M. Weiss 2008 "Cellular mechanisms of Cnidarian bleaching: stress causes the collapse of symbiosis", corals go through different phases of stress response.
To get to full fledged necrosis very severe stress needs to occur. Recently, in the scientific literature, there is more and more evidence that the cause is pathogens and not a lot of the "hand of the reefkeeper" as many talking heads on the internet like to always attribute it too (not that reefkeepers aren't capable of killing corals as well, however, it is not always "alk overdoses" for example).
some examples:
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/18/in-the-first-known-case-human-bacteria-kills-coral/
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0002393
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1462-2920.2012.02746.x/abstract
High nutrients can likely drive bacteria via various means. If the solution to all necrosis issues was to raise nutrient levels, then people would have done much better with acros in the 80s and 90s. It is only in recent years, when more advanced filtration methods have become widely available that acros have become more common place in the hobby. Just my .02, but this isn't coincidence...
We can all strive to live in a simple reef world, where everything follows nice cook-book methodology and no thought is required, or we can look at the evidence and try to figure things out. Everyone has a preference on this and that fine, but don't flame me for assuming that people posting in an "advanced forum" are not looking for the simplest advice humanly possible..
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