Cultivated Reef semi annual FRAG DRAFT!!!

Super super psyched! Hope there's a ton of Lps and Zoa heads there!

I've never used marine snow so maybe someone else can chime in here but I would say that as long as you have some fish that you are feeding then the corals will get all they need from fish waste and lighting.

This really sucks! I wish I could be there!

Marine snow is in my opinion bottled pollution, your actually better off feeding small amounts of the watery part of your skimmate back into your tank. (which I do, and there is science to back up why). in your skimmate certain bacteria and micro fauna proliferate and hit very high concentrations, far higher than is typically available in your tank due to the extreme concentration of food available in the skimmer cup. I have re-fed skimmate for about 6 years now. be careful if you attempt this too much, well, you can understand the risks of putting what you removed back in... ALSO I want to note, I started this because I was having a hard time keeping various decorative sponges and the stuffs that grows in the skimmate seems to be in the right size range for sponges to feed on because my success rate appeared to go up (aka they stopped receeding) it could be coincidental.

Please share the science to back this up. Not saying that to call you out, I'd actually like to read it if you have a source. I've read a few thread where people ask the question and then get chastised for it but I've never read anything written to support the practice. I have read a detailed article that will make your head spin of the chemistry of skimmate. Personally I think the practice may do more harm than good but, with that said, your reason for doing it (target feeding only certain areas i.e. sponges) makes a lot of sense. The question becomes, is what your placing back into the water actually beneficial?

I'll see if I can find the paper that was analyzing skimmate before and after drying it out for chemical analysis, it's like 7 years ago that I read it.  It's the before drying that was important to me because once you dry it there's no way of telling what was alive and possibly bio-available as food source, dry it out and everything is broken down to its chemical components or killed which definitely affects the end analysis like not knowing if the bacteria present in the analysis was live or dead etc and there may now be far better analysis available than that one.

Don't quote me on this but I believe it was sprung or borneman that wrote the analysis that I used. The conclusions of possibly feeding skimmate back to the tank was entirely my own and a desperate attempt to keep my various pink, red, yellow sponges alive, which in my opinion worked. I don't know why some one would chastize some one for asking for the research they used to reach their conclusions? isn't that like the opposite of what forums like this are for? which I believe to be sharing information to help grow the hobby and our knowledge of how to keep the tricky stuff, not bury it with "I'm right and it doesn't matter what information I use" I'll never understand people like that.