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Synthetic Sea Salt formula

With all the forms of technology available today I can't imagine how the "information was never brought back together" if the data collected was worth publishing. The scientists I work with regularly collaborate and publish with people located all over the world.
 
Lmecher;172983 said:
Hmmm...interesting thread. For the record, I use Seachem reef salt. I switched from Oceanic because I couldn't keep my PH up. I have been happy with it.

This was my problem as well. The ph would stay around 7.8 and wouldnt get any higher. I was dosing almost everyday and decided to make a change.
 
esquid;172982 said:
With all the forms of technology available today I can't imagine how the "information was never brought back together" if the data collected was worth publishing. The scientists I work with regularly collaborate and publish with people located all over the world.

I dont believe it was a problem getting the info so much as getting people to give him the other information. I am still looking for the post. I unfortunately no longer have the email but I will find the study.
 
Here is part two of where he was begining to publish is findings.

http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2006-09/eb/index.php

There was no third part that I could find though there was a thread conversation on one of the forums regarding the talk he gave on this point.

I contacted Eric via email to ask what his finding were and to ask which salt he found worked best. While he stated (and I agree) that it is a complex matter of which salt works best the over all opinion after using Instant Ocean in the study, he found it to a very bad salt with very bad and surprising (his words) results.

I will be the first to admit that I dont know much about the different salts. I know what works for me and what doesnt. Instant ocean didnt work so I went looking for something that would.
 
I forgot about that one because the data/analysis never got shared. I find it hard to believe that the hobbyists involved didn't give him the data, and he sure made it sound like he had the data, but just hadn't yet analyzed it.

Each salt was put in one tank against a NSW control, each salt in different location, run by a different person, so many saw problems with the study even when it was first announced - the major issue being only one data point per salt. There are others. I am surprised that Eric said that IO was very bad given it was only to be put in one tank and tested once - its just the kind of thing he has argued against others doing in the past.

Here is an interesting review of the proposed methodology:
borneman-lowesaltstudycritique - ASIRA

Here is something that Eric said:
Yes, I am very sorry for the rush at the end, and I really would have liked some more time for both of us to describe what we observed.

Long and short of it is that at this point we have data but we have not done any analyses to see if there is any significant differences in the growth, reproduction or mortality of the corals, fish, echinoderms, gastropods, sponges, octocorals, zoanthids, corallimorphs, algae or other species compared to the control.

What we presented were some interesting things - such as what Frank mentioned... finding various micro and turf-algae, copepods, and other microbes in tanks triple washed with autoclaved substrate, purified water and salt. We saw clear trends in some of the salt brands in terms of turf and cyanobacteria continuing to thrive in some salts and not in others. We saw very clear differences in coralline coverage and foraminiferan growth and variations in successional species. I mistakenly kept saying bryozoan rather than foraminiferan in the talk...my bad. We also saw, in some cases, very heavy undeisrable algal growth month after month even after removing it after each water change despite very low measurable inorganic nutrients, and very little undesirable algae growth in some cases where inorganic nutrients were quite measurable. The difference, as Habib Sekha rightfully pointed out, is probably the unmeasurable organic components, but then the question is why the difference in the dynamics of nutrients varied given the same treatments.

Because the study literally ended the day before the conference, there was no way to analyze the results. I will say that, at least from being familiar with the data and the appearance of the tanks and the survival and appearance of the species that there are certainly some salts I would prefer to use in my tank and some that I probably wouldn't use again, even though I have used them for many years without any obvious negative effects. I have a feeling that the reason these differences are not observed by those using these salts, myself included, is that the complexity of the reef tank community is able to mitigate the good and bad aspects of the salts that became apparent in a more controlled environment.

BUT, and I STRESS BUT, the results once analyzed might very well show there are no significant differences between the salts and the control. It appears from a cursory look at the data that at least for some species there will be a significant difference. If there is, then I think it will be interesting to go back and run replicates of those tanks and species and look more carefully at what factors might be at work to cause the differences, either better or worse.

Anecdotally from our observations and the overall appearance and experience with the nine salts tested - in other words, if the average person came into the lab and had to pick a tank they would want to take home - they would probably throw Tank J (Instant Ocean) away because of the continuous heavy cyanobacterial growth with every batch, and would probably choose Tank F (Red Sea) because of the heavy coralline growth, booming amphipod population (I still have to count all of them!!!), tight ball of Chaetomorpha, and overall apparent health of the species. Yet, some of the other tanks had reproduction that exceeded Tank F in some species, and concurrently had less that other salts, too. The control was not without mortality, either, and had relatively low algal growth (corallines and turfs/cyano) but was the first to show strong foram growth.

Basically, there are a lot of things that happened, lots of data, pluses and minuses in each tank, and until we do the analyses, there really can't be an informed answer as to what salts are great or not so great.

Frank, I appreciate your offer. Rob Toonen and I spoke quite a bit last night as to how to approch the statstics, and I would like to talk with you about it as well. There are likely limitations to how much we can actually say and I need to think about how best to approach and get as much information out of what we did as possible. Some things are straightforward, others not so easy, and some may indicate something significant that will require more testing and replication.

The good thing is we have samples for further analyses and I would finally end this post by saying this is far from the definitive study. I hope it will be a platform that can be used for further work, comparison and discussion.

http://forum.marinedepot.com/Topic45946-9-1.aspx

No real data and apparently the analysis was never done. I wouldn't change salt mix based on one 10 gallon tank 'test'.

In many peoples opinion, the entire effort was done a disservice by them talking about results prematurely. I really appreciated the effort, but there are problems with the methodology and we never got results. What we did get was people changing salt brands based on hearsay and incomplete information (most notably missing was the analysis of the mortalities in the 'controls' as compared to the 'results' from the single test tanks).

I saw it summed it up this way:

Borneman puts himself out there as a scientist. He publicly tore into those guys who did the vodka experiments when they submitted an article to reefkeeping. He didn't allow it to be published but bashed it in a response piece. I think he should be held up to the same scrutiny he's shown others in this hobby over the years. Any experiment can be explained in a digestible manner. Presenters do it all the time, they talk to their audience. You make it more basic for those not familiar with the work and more complicated for those who are but that doesn't change the value of the work you've done. I haven't seen the study yet but the fact that he's saying there were mistakes doesn't sound good especially since hobbyist are making changes based on it.


Many people and institutions did and do use IO without problems and with fantastic results. Making a change based on any of the salt studies is generally regarded as a bad idea, making a change based on this one, given the lack of actual information, seems like a bigger mistake.
 
SabrinaR;172985 said:
This was my problem as well. The ph would stay around 7.8 and wouldnt get any higher. I was dosing almost everyday and decided to make a change.

I wouldn't worry about a pH of 7.8 - http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2004-09/rhf/index.php
You cant really control pH well in saltwater, and IME 7.8 is fine and over time will eventually creep up. I generally advise against chasing numbers in a reef tank because of the inaccuracies in testing and because the animals will adapt to a very wide range of parameters. I am much happier using the test numbers for overall trending, not for dialing in a parameter. I have seen people cause more issues in their tanks by trying to adjust the pH rather than just leaving it alone.
 
Thales;173006 said:
I wouldn't worry about a pH of 7.8 - http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2004-09/rhf/index.php
You cant really control pH well in saltwater, and IME 7.8 is fine and over time will eventually creep up. I generally advise against chasing numbers in a reef tank because of the inaccuracies in testing and because the animals will adapt to a very wide range of parameters. I am much happier using the test numbers for overall trending, not for dialing in a parameter. I have seen people cause more issues in their tanks by trying to adjust the pH rather than just leaving it alone.

So you would say that 7.8 is ok for an octopus? What about the day to night time swing? I leave my sump light on 24/7 to help with this but still worry that its to much. Though it is more stable now, I have seen it as high as 8.2 during the day and 7.8 at night. Would this swing be considered ok?
 
Those numbers wouldn't bother me at all.

If they did, I would start with the stuff in the article I linked - have you done an aeration test?
 
If the low PH is caused by an excess of dissolved C02, you should be concerned because that suggests possibly low 02, which is especially bad for an octopus. To test that, check the PH, and then run an air-stone in a cup of tank water for a few minutes, and then check the PH of the water in the cup. If it is significantly higher then the tank was it means your low PH is due to insufficient aeration / gas exchange.
 

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