Brightwell Aquatics has a handful of new products they recently released, including SpongExcel to enhance growth of sponges and gastropods and Cuprion, an ionic copper solution. The SpongExcel may be the first true “silica” dosing product on the market aimed…
Silica Dosing: reef blasphemy or another form of nutrient export?
It has been long held that silica in reef tanks is bad, very, very bad. We avoid beach and play sand like it’s poison because it is believed that silica will cause an undesirable diatom bloom: brown glass, brown gook on rock and substrates, and unhappy reefkeepers. But what if we could control this system and use it to our advantage…say, to increase nutrient export? Let’s take a look at some old data, some new data, and a controversial hypothesis: that dosing silica may increase nutrient export efficiency.
