Urgent Carbon made water black help!!!

Yes you do. Especially with any corals that perform chemical warfare. I know my tank gets significantly worse looking if I don't run carbon. Feather dusters retract and won't come out, and that's the first sign. Fleshier corals stop inflating and pull back, and eventually start dying. Run carbon for a day, and they all return to normal.

 

Not trying to jerk your chain here but didn't you setup this tank like 18 days ago? If it looks "significantly worse" when you stop running carbon and you've had the tank up for that short of time, I'd say there are some other issues going on. There shouldn't be enough of anything in the tank for carbon to make any kind of visual difference, although that's just opinion and as always I could be wrong.

 

Nope, not me. My tank has been set up for a year and a half. It's not immediately when I stop carbon, it happens over the course of a week or so for the feather dusters to start retracting. I happen to have a large amount of chalices in the tank, which contribute a significant amount of allelopathic chemicals into the water.

 

I was referring to the OP. Not you. Your names look so similar that I got confused. Sorry.

 

The coral article has been discussed to death I think. Everyone has their opinion. Mine is that the conclusions are laughable given that the author didn't really bother adjusting for a single confounder or make any comparison to any alternative options, in order to show that they could be better. Many very smart people have spent a lot of time thinking about causality and how to show it. There is much scientific as well as philisophical literature on this subject and the author apparently decided to ignore it all (yeah, so how do I really feel you ask? LOL).

The data is good though and I think he did a great job with the experiment, but it has a lot of limitations. Certainly does provide reason for caution though. I just think his conclusions were, say, a bit overzealous LOL.

As to removing too much. Carbon is much better at removing organics than protein skimming. It can potentially remove too much. Like everything moderation is key and with reasonable amounts and reasonable amounts of food input, water changes etc... This tends not to be an issue.




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That would largely be because carbon and protein skimming don't overlap too much in what exactly they remove.

 

I'm not sure I'd word it exactly that way. Carbon will remove just about everything protein skimming will remove and then some. The main benefit to skimming is it's cheaper in the long run, as carbon exhausts quickly and would become expensive to replace without skimming. Not to say there may be some things that skimming may catch and GAC won't but not that much...


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