Maybe you should be dosing silica to your reef tank!!!!!

[randy holmes-farley]

Why aren't you dosing silica?

It is easy to test.

You very likely do not have natural levels of dissolved silica in your tank, and it is likely to be rapidly consumed when you add some.

A number of tank organisms, from sponges to limpets, require silica and some may be silica-limited in your tank.

It is very, very inexpensive to buy the necessary supplement.

Diatom growth is not necessarily something to be feared. It may actually make your glass easier to see through and your other tank organisms may be happier when they consume the diatoms.

So why not give it a try?

Here's an article that describes what organsims use silica in the oceans, and in reef tanks, how to test for it and dose it, what sources of soluble silica there are in reef tanks, where to buy the supplements, how rapidly it is depleted, and shows pictures of what happens when you dose it to a real reef tank. It also demonstrates experimentally that silica sand does dissolve, but points out that this may not be a good way to dose silica because the dissolution rate is out of the aquarists control.

Happy dosing!

http://advancedaquarist.com/issues/jan2003/feature.htm

 

[Anonymous]

what about folks who are using a silica substrate already? do they need to go beyond that and actually add? (came up in a discussion last night.)

 

[randy holmes-farley]

I discuss that in the article. It is likely better than no dosing, but the problem is that you don't have any control over what you are getting. I measured the silica release from substrate (it's in the article), but they will vary a lot, I expect, from little to no silica released for a true beach sand, to more from a ground up sand like that at Home Depot. Still, they may all be less than I'm recommending people to dose (though I'm not sure about that).

The article certainly debunks the "hypothesis" that "silica" sand cannot dissolve, and the other "hypothesis" that diatoms are not silica limited in reef tanks. They most obviously are in mine (the test tank for the experiments).