Thursday Thrive

[Drichards]

What do you add to your tanks to help you coral thrive? Ie: phtyo, pods, reef energy ect. It can be anything that noticeably made a difference in the health of your corals.

- I've been using Brightwell Restore and have seen steady results with tissue recession slowly regenerating

 

[dz6t]

I pour live phyto to my systems every other days.

 

[BiGGiePauls33]

Trace elements such as Reef Moonshiners, Captiv8, Triton etc. World of of a difference in my opinion. Obviously learn about the chemistry of your system before jumping into anything as we all know nothing good happens fast in this hobby.

 

[afboundguy]

I have 6 different copepods cultures going with 3 different types that I add to the tank 1-2 times a week. I also do daily baby brine shrimp in two of the round don't need air going setups. The BBS and pods are mainly to keep my Biota mandarinfish fat and healthy even though he's a pig and eats frozen and pellets like a champ but it also adds to the diversity of the tank.

I also have a rotifer culture that I add to the tank daily. Main goal of the rotifer culture is to try and hatch at least one batch or clownfish and try and raise them. Once I do that I am not sure if I'll keep the profiter culture at all but I probably will at least downsize to save some time and money.

I also now have 7 different strands of phyto I am culturing in 14 different half gallon containers which are: Nannochloropsis
Tetraselmis chui
Tisochrysis lutea
Rhodomonas lens (was Salina but it went clear then brown and didn't stay red)
Chaetoceros calcitrans
Thalassiosira weissfloggii Pheaodactylum tricornutum

I started the phyto cultures to feed the tank, pods and rotifers and I dose the tank daily. I haven't dose the tank with all 7 strands just yet as I started with Nanno, Tetra, T-Iso and Rhody Salina but dosing the tank with those 4 strands has a noticeable impact on the tank. I barely have to clean/scrape the glass and when I do every few days to once a week it is easy to scrape off and significantly less than when I wasn't dosing.

I also have several non-photosynthetic corals so I add do a "heavy" dose but the corals look amazing, there are pods everywhere on the glass even with the mandarin in a 35 gallon tank and I have significantly less nuscience algae on the rockwork.

Three of the new strands are what are called silicate strands that should further help reduce nuscience algae and specifically lessen the chance I will ever get Dinos in my tank as the silicates should outcompete any Dinos while also providing a large variation of nutrition to the tank, pods and rotifers.

It's probably a little overkill doing 7 strands but it's enjoyable doing the cultures and I with my old 25 gallon tank I did Nanno and Tetra and saw a difference and in this tank I have seen a difference with 4 strands so I am assuming 7 strands will be even better!

 

[afboundguy]

Trace elements such as Reef Moonshiners, Captiv8, Triton etc. World of of a difference in my opinion. Obviously learn about the chemistry of your system before jumping into anything as we all know nothing good happens fast in this hobby.

Also on that note I plan to start doing the aqua forest 3 part that includes trace elements very soon just trying to find free time to mix the ingredients (much much cheaper buying and mixing compared to buying already mixed products) and then set up a dosing pump.

Probably not as beneficial as specific trace elements as I have a smaller volume and in theory weekly water changes should suffice but it wasn't that much more to buy the aqua forest components to do the 3 part compared to basic 2 part so figured it is worth a shot!