SantaMonica

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Part 1 of 3

In a classic case of "not doing research", some anti-turf folks on another site have ended up helping out the turf scene. They are constantly accusing pro-turf or pro-algae folks, and especially anti-skimmer folks, of not having research. So they post a research video from the College of Marine Science (U of S. FL, St. Petersburg) on that site, which is supposed to prove with research that algae, especially turf, kills corals. Yes. Then they
follow it up with "So I guess you didn't watch the video, right?"

Well. I took the time to watch it (one hour). But, I guess they did NOT. The video starts out appearing to make the point of "algae kills corals", and if you stopped watching after fifteen minutes, that's what you'd think. But the first part of that presentation is just a setup for the presenter's further explanations, and is not the point itself.

It's a similar situation to a presentation for beginners about how rock, sand, and the nitrogen cycle works: You would start by saying "If I have a fish in a bucket of water, and I pour in ammonia, the fish will die." This is true, but it's only used to set up later explanations of how rock and sand come into the picture to stop the death of the fish.

SantaMonica

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Part 2 of 3:

So it turns out that if you watch the whole research video, the presenter/researcher not only makes the point of pro-algae folks, and counters the point of the people who posted it (as their evidence), but it also counters the entire group of people who say no-skimmers and high-DOC's are bad. I've been saying that my focus never was skimmer or no-skimmer; instead my focus was reducing N and P cheaply, quickly, and with no risk. But since these people made this video/research available, I'll use it:

The presenter is trying to show how "algae that kills coral" would SEEM to occur, so later he can show you what they really found in their research. The crux of his presentation is basically: "We thought higher DOC's were the cause of coral death; We were wrong. Lower DOC's are" (these are my words).

SantaMonica

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Part 3 of 3:

So here is the video, with rough quotes of what the video says, along with the minutes and seconds into the video where you can see it for yourself:

http://www.marine.usf.edu/videos/2007-01-26.wmv

23:30 "Bulk DOC does not correlate with coral decline; higher DOC areas have healthier corals; lower DOC areas have weaker corals. The opposite of what we predicted".

24:40 "The DOC to DIN ratio's are higher on healthy reefs, and lower on less-healthy reefs".

25:45 "Microbial numbers are elevated with a lower DOC to DIN ratio" (!) (even I got that one wrong).

34:00 "Christmas Island, with the really low DOC, has the highest pathogens, while Kingman Island, with the highest DOC, has the lowest pathogens."

37:00 "On Kingman Island you have high hard-coral coverage and the lowest disease [and highest DOC]. That's weird! What you SHOULD find is that as hard-coral coverage reduces, it should be harder for the pathogens to find hosts, so you should see a pathogen decrease. But we're not seeing that, which means there is SOMETHING ELSE going on."

49:20 "The DOC definitely always goes down, in the really bad coral areas".

52:39 "You can actually put the corals where the nutrients are really high, and the corals are not dying; in some cases they tend to grow better, which is also true in our [???].

So I submit to them, using their own evidence, that not using a skimmer, with the resultant increase in DOC's (and now apparent decrease in microbes), is not in-itself a coral killer. Something else is. And this explains why some people using algal-only filtration can grow great sps.

bschuerman

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Fascinating thanks for this info!

__________________
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55 Gallon Reef Tank
Location: Tucson, Arizona

johnmaloney

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seen this post a couple of times. it is great you are spreading the good word. do you find the mess ever falls back into the tank when scraping?

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SantaMonica

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Thanks... glad you folks like the info.

No, the algae never get into the tank because you have to take the screen to the sink and wash, scrub or scrape it, under tap water, then re-install it. Washing/scrubbing takes about a minute, and that's what most people need. Scraping (of real red/brown stiff turf) takes a razor blade and fives minutes or so.

SantaMonica

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Wow. There's so much to post that I don't know which should be first. Today I'll cover max inputs that's I've been able to achieve.

I've been experimenting with how much I can feed my 90g, with only my 144 square inch turf screen doing the filtering. I'd add more food for a few days, then the Salifert N test would start showing a tiny bit of pink (about a .2 reading). Then I'd cut the food in half, until the reading went clear (zero N measured). Interestingly, P never increased. Ever. Only N. So after a few tries, here's the max I've been able feed the tank while just barely getting an N increase:


Max Feeding:

Liquid Life Marine Plankton with Cyclopeeze: 3 pumps a day
Liquid Life Bio Plankton (live phyto): 2 pumps a day
Frozone mysis: 2 cubes a day, unwashed, thawed in 4 oz tap water.
Silversides: 1 per week (for the eel)


Tank:

90 Display, BB
20 Sump
150 pounds LR
60 inches fish
40 corals, all softie and lps
6000 gph circulation
Carbon now used once a month for allelpathics


I'm now settling in on a lesser amount:

1 pump phyto
1-2 pumps plankton
2 cubes mysis, unwashed, thawed in 4 oz tap water.
Silversides: 1 per week (for the eel)

SantaMonica

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Turf is different from a fuge in so many ways:



o Reduces N and P to much lower levels than fuge/macro can.

o Is very quick to respond to excess nitrate and phosphate spikes (the turf "screen" always
stays the same size after it is trimmed); much quicker than refugiums/macros which have
smaller surface areas after they are trimmed.

o Traps no waste/food like a refugium or DSB does; waste/food flows right past the screen.

o Does not release strands into display, like chaeto.

o Does not go sexual, like caulerpa can.

o Is 1/2 or 1/3 the size.

o Weighs nothing.

o Cools the water.

o Much easier to clean/harvest.

o Can be hung above tank so pods drain into tank.

o Is free.

o Is portable.

o Can run two, for backup.

o Will oxygenate the tank if main return pump goes out.



Yes, as I mentioned in my post, a lot of the mechanisms of turf have been on the forums for a while. I read most of them going back to 2000, and a few alt.rec.aquaria ones back to '93. And I also gathered info from those who used turf in the past, or read Dynamic Aquaria, which thereby brings us back to the '70s for using turf in aquariums. The "new" part, however, is just putting the turf into a bucket, and doing it for (basically) free. The only commercial turf unit you can buy today cost $3,000 USD, and is bigger than most tanks itself. Since basically nobody is going to spend that, and because it's so big, there has been no talk of turf in the last few years, and therefore folks new to reefs don't know about turf at all. Kinda like if there were a new type of skimmer that only cost $30 but outperformed every other type including becketts, but nobody was talking about it. The purpose of me posting is to get new folks involved, without making it too technical, so that we can all benefit from what can be learned about the turf. I left the technical stuff on the original RC post.

Concerning yellowing, this has something to do with when and how the algae is scraped ("harvested"), and also what type of algae is growing. It's also something that folks years ago experienced, but most folks nowadays don't. I think it's the harvesting that is making the difference. It's pretty well known that if you just leave the algae to grow and grow, that you'll definitely get yellowing. After all, the yellowing is coming from the chlorophyll's which I believe are green-plant based. And if you don't harvest, the green algae will overtake the brown/red. But the actual turf we want is not green, it's brown/red. So I believe this is why the current group of turf users get very high filtering (not needing any help), and no yellowing.

However another "discovery" has come about by sheer chance (by user "florida joe" on one of the forums), resulting from the physical size of the unit. The original units were big and bulkly and not easily disassembled, and thus most folks back then would just scrape the turf while in-place. Well, it looks like this caused a rupturing of algal cells, causing the contents to be reintroduced to the tank water. The current batch of small scrubbers, including my turf bucket, requires you to take the screen off and clean it in the sink with running tap water. So that problem is solved. I know I have zero yellowing in mine. But if yellowing did occur for whatever reason, a monthly dose of carbon (that you need anyway to remove allelopathics) will fix it up. But the removing of the green, weekly, done in the sink, should eliminate the yellowing by itself.

Concerning SPS, I don't like them, but here's seller of them that only uses turf:

Stonies, SPS, Soft Coral and Polyps

wes

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very interesting thanks for sharing. Just curious, what are you using to take your phosphate measurements? The common PO4 test kit is not going to pick anything up for comparison.

SantaMonica

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Salifert. First time in the history of the tank that it shows clear.

SantaMonica

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Here is the screen from the person who bought pre-grown turf from Inland Aquatics, after growing on the tank for one week, and then after cleaning:

wes

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The Salifert PO4 kit is pretty much worthless. It was always clear for me when in reality my PO4 levels were high. I am curious to see how the numbers look with Hannah Low Range meter. Then we will really know if this method could work well for an SPS system.

SantaMonica

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Here's a rather ingenious screen-in-a-trashcan that someone just built. This type of design will eliminate evaporation (and cooling), if that's what you want. One thing I might change would be the distance of the bulb to the screen; it should be so close that it almost touches it. In all the builds I've seen so far, the ones that have slow growth always have the bulb too far away, or too small a wattage.

SantaMonica

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Here is an example of a screen that I wish were done better. He's using the skimmer output and dropping it right down on the screen at an angle, so that most of it goes through the screen. I'd rather see the water spread out across the screen. Also, the light is too far away. Thus, he got very little growth in the first seven days:

SantaMonica

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Today I thought I'd show what's up with my screen. I'm back to using just my main original bucket (that started with pre-grown screen), since the 2nd bucket that I used for the build thread is on loan to the lfs. I'll be posting progress pics of that soon. But for my tank/screen, N and P are zero of course. I check every day unless I forget. The main development has been true green turf, i.e, not green hair or slime. Now, hair and slime are always there (they grow right over everything else), but I started noticing that after regular cleanings there were still some green remaining. I thought I was just rushing and missing it, but it got to be too much green. So on the next cleaning I used the camera, and when cleaning I found for the first time true green turf. I also let it grow more than I normally would, so the pics would show more:

Here is the screen just before cleaning, looking down into the bucket (both sides looked about the same).


Hi-Res: http://www.radio-media.com/fish/Scre...ng08-27-08.jpg


Here is the screen pulled out (still not cleaned):


Hi-Res: http://www.radio-media.com/fish/Scre...ed08-27-08.jpg


Here is the screen after a regular cleaning (scrubbing) with fingernails and toothbrush. Note that tons of green remains:


Hi-Res: http://www.radio-media.com/fish/Scre...ng08-27-08.jpg


Here is the screen after scraping with a razor blade:


Hi-Res: http://www.radio-media.com/fish/Scre...ng08-27-08.jpg


Note how most of the green turf is on the top half of the screen, near the lights. The flow is the same; only the light is stronger near the top (the very top is only one inch from the lights). It had been exactly on one month since I'd used a razor before this. It took that long for the real turf to grow (both red/brown and green). Real turf takes so long because it is very tightly packed and strong, with very little water. It looks like the green turf grows a bit faster than the red/brown, however, and is not quite as strong; it grows longer too. However I still could not scrub it off with my fingernails or a toothbrush, no matter how hard I tried. Only the razor could get it off. Took about 5 minutes; not bad for a month of growing.

Anyways, intrigued by this green turf, I went down to the beach with a camera so I could search for what I've been wanting for a while: Pics of how real turf lives. Sure enough I found it on the pylings of the pier at Paradise Cove (just north of Malibu):


Hi-Res: http://www.radio-media.com/fish/TurfBeach.jpg


Hi-Res: http://www.radio-media.com/fish/TurfBeachCloseup.jpg


It's exacty what was on my screen. The white specs you see are sand. In order to get the second (closup) pic, I had to pinch the turf very hard and pull it out... like pulling out plant roots; then I held it up for the pic. Note also that it's low tide, which means that the turf holds its color and stays alive for many hours in direct sunlight with no water. Further down the beach I found the same turf on rocks that were 100 feet away from the water.

So, like I said before, real turf is used to living out of the water, and that's why I say that to simulate this (as Aday's machine does) you need some type of on-off-on pulsed flow, and the easiest way I could think to do this was a wavemaker timer (although, as I'll post soon, other folks are coming up with ingenious ways too.)

And again, the importance of light is clearly apparent with this green turf, since it grew no more that 6" away from the lights at the top. And lastly, it does look like some of the red/brown is being replaced by the green, which makes sense since the original red/brown came from IA with their different nutrients and lighting.

BigBoy69

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tagging along, very interesting.

You should test with a calorimeter for your phosphates.
Can you send me a water sample and I can test your phosphate with my meter?

SantaMonica

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Sure I can send a sample if you like. However my situation is that for 2.5 years my Salifert test always showed blue... anywhere from .2 to 5 (yes 5, not .5). In the first week of using the pre-grown screen from IA, the P went to zero and stayed there. And also for the first time in the display, algae is reducing and coralline is increasing. So those are the main goals, of course.

BigBoy69

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The problem with the salifert is that they are not accurate and the reps basically said that at MACNA last year. Mine would always show 0 on the salifert kit. I then took a sample to my buddies house and he checked it 3 different times and it was reading .73!!!! which is very very high. I now keep my system at .01 - .02
I can PM you my addy, I would be interested to see what it is on the meter.

SantaMonica

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Ok.

SantaMonica

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Reader Hits Zero!

'Gone Postal' who is on the RS site, becomes the first homebuilt screen user to reach zero nitrate. No pics from him yet, but he says, "My trates hit 0 for the first time in the 5 months that my tank has been up. The lowest i had ever gotten them to was 5. I built my setup [9 days ago]. I have some growth, but nothing too spectacular. The screen is completely covered in brown, but it seems as if it's just surface algae - not really hair algae, etc like I'd originally expected. Comes off really easy. If I just wipe my finger across, the screen is clear again."

And here's a second person below, with the build-of-the-day. He says "I am currently running this system, and I'm hoping to reduce my nitrates from a steady 20 down to zero. Here's my set up on the 2nd week. (water is supplied from the output of my UV filter)". Note that he drilled his pipe, instead of cutting a slot in it; he said he did not have a rotary cutting tool, and thus he had to make it only one-sided: