Carbon causing lateral line erosion

I don't think this study proved causation (which is very difficult to do) as many people are saying.

HLLE appears to be caused by a variety of factors. This small research study just opened up a lot of doors to investigate. The underlying principles at work remain a mystery.

 

Right, and you can't really prove causation directly, you can show causation by disproving the alternative hypotheses. Just my .02, but I'd like to see if the results hold under more typical home reef tank conditions. After all, that's what we want to know, "does carbon cause HLLE in a home reef tank?" It would be nice to see some evidence for this and least show some evidence for causation, the current study does not just "not prove" causation, it really doesn't even show much if any evidence for causation.

For example, in this study, they did not wash the carbon. So, they can't even show it was the carbon that led to the result. Perhaps there was a contaminant remaining from the manufacturing process. Every carbon I've purchased says on the bottle to rinse before use.

Also, it could be fines, so, maybe rinsing would be sufficient to remove.

Or if it's fines, a lot of people think fines are removed via protein skimming. So, do the results hold if there is a protein skimmer or other typical filtration on the tank?

If it's instead heavy metal toxicity, do the results hold in a more established tank, with more organic material in the rocks and substrate, to bind heavy metals.

Or does a different salt mix, or better overall filtration etc... typically encountered in a home reef, lower the heavy metal contamination to low enough levels carbon wouldn't have an effect

Or, does a different feeding regime introduce enough organics to bind

Or if it is heavy metal toxicity, or some other mechanism as a result of removing something, such as maybe trace elements. Then are similar results seen when other types of carbon, other synthetic media, protein skimming, or other filtration that removes things are used?

etc...

While on the surface the study appears to show a powerful result, the reality is there are really as many unanswered questions now as there were before the study was published. The scope of the study was just too small to draw any kind of real world conclusions. Hopefully others will continue this line of research and continue to address these remaining questions.

 

ime i have a sailfin tang started showing signs of HLLE. i started changing my routine. from more water changes (water quality was good ) to diet and looked into electric going thru the system. with no sign of stopping HLLE. not knowing that carbon was a facter or not i stopped using it . then i notice that HLLE stopped . at that time didnt know why , but was happy for the tang. started using Brightwell Aminomega supplement .which started to reverse the HLLE. which to me i wasnt feeding my tang properly (i thought). stopped supplementing and didnt change my feeding habits. still no HLLE and no carbon. IME

 

I don't mind saying a theory has been proved (although this is not technically possible) if there is an overwhelming amount of evidence to support it. For example, I will treat the theory of evolution as "proven". However, this study was small in scope and I think the authors are far from achieving a level of support that would warrant people saying this is a "smoking gun" or "proof" that GAC causes HLLE.

This is not a criticism of the research, only healthy skepticism.

There are plenty of unknowns about the underlying causes of this disease. This study did not answer questions about the impact of diet, types of carbon, species of fish, etc on HLLE development.

 

Well, I would say that the only thing it did shed some light on was the types of carbon. They used 3 tanks; one with no carbon, one with bituminous, and one with lignite. The lignite fish all had visible lesions after a period of time, while the bituminous carbon fish had microscopic lesions, and the no-carbon had no lesions at all.

 

There was NO bituminous carbon in the study. The study only looked at lignite carbon in pelleted and granular forms.

 

Whoops, sorry. I should know better than to post within 10 mins of waking up by now. ;D

 

No worries I know the feeling. I've apologized many times for posting before having my coffee