- Hi guys and girls, I'm Reef Man,
and today we're going to talk about trace elements
and making DIY solutions to manage their levels in our tank.
First, what exactly is a trace element?
Well, it's something that's important for some sort
of biological process, but only in tiny amounts.
The encyclopedia said less than .1% by volume,
so tiny trace amounts.
All sorts of elements, including things like gold,
uranium, even lead and arsenic,
are considered trace elements in ocean water.
Not all of them are useful, or even healthy
to have in our tanks, though, think about
dosing lead, you wouldn't do that.
Useful trace elements are things like iodine,
molybdenum, vanadium, nickel, copper, cobalt,
manganese, iron, selenium and zinc.
There are others, but.
Your best option for measuring these
are things like the ICP test kits
that you can buy, and I used the
Triton ICP test kit for my tank.
In the ocean, concentrations of these various
trace elements, they vary widely, depending on
the depth of the water and the region of the world.
So all we can do is try to find an average
that works for our tanks.
Some of these, like iron and selenium,
are just barely detectable in the natural ocean,
yet they play an important part
in the health of the animals that live in it.
Don't dose what you don't test.
I can't stress this enough,
it's very important to not dose things
that you're not paying attention to.
Having an accurate way to test
is particularly important for trace elements
because some of them are quite toxic
if too much is present in the water.
Think about dosing copper, you would never
do that in a reef tank, and yet our animals,
they need trace amounts of it to survive.
Iodine is also important, but it'll disinfect
your whole tank at a higher concentration.
In fact, let's start with iodine.
Iodine helps with the growth of soft coral,
shrimp, sponges, tunicates, gorgonians and more.
I have a whole video, I'll link it.
Remember that iodine is hard to test for.
So if you're going to dose it, be careful,
and think about using an ICP test.
You can use something like potassium iodide
if you do want to make your own dosing solution for it.
Strontium is another trace element,
and this metal is used much like calcium in our tanks.
It's used in the skeletons of thinks that are grow,
snails need it to be able to grow their shells.
You can use things like strontium chloride hexahydrate
to increase the levels of strontium in your tank.
Molybdenum is used by bacteria and the dinoflagellates
that grown inside the coral to grow.
And obviously, these tiny organisms
are important to the overall health of our fish
and coral, so having molybdenum
in our tank is also important.
You can use sodium molybdate in order
to increase the levels of molybdenum in your tank water.
Zinc is another trace element that's particularly useful
in biological processes that have to take place
for the overall health of the animals
that we keep in our tanks.
Zinc is particularly important in order
for some of the enzymes that our animals need to work.
If you find that you are low on zinc,
not a common problem, but it happens,
a good way to dose it would be
by using zinc chloride.
Manganese is used by cells as they grow,
and particularly macroalgae cells.
In fact, macroalgae is quite good
at completely stripping the water of free manganese.
You can dose manganese using manganese sulfate.
Now, there are other trace elements,
things like selenium, gold, cobalt,
and a whole bunch more that you just
don't need to worry about dosing.
The only thing that you need to do
to get these in your tank water
is do a water change every now and then.
Your salt mix has more than enough,
and if you dose those other things
the impurities in those chemicals
are going to add even more of these
fringe trace elements.
Now, keep in mind what is actually in your dosing chemical.
For example, you wanna dose iodine,
so you use potassium iodide, it's a good source.
But it has both iodine and potassium.
If you look at the molecular weight of potassium iodide,
it's about 166, the formula is KI,
so one potassium atom and one iodine atom, potassium iodide.
Potassium's atomic weight is about 39,
while iodine is about 126,
so there's way more iodine by weight in potassium iodide
than there is potassium.
Therefore, though it has potassium,
you would not wanna use it to raise the potassium level
of your tank, you would kill everything with so much iodine.
Most of the common chemicals that we use for trace element
dosing are sulfates or chlorides,
of the metal that we would want to increase.
And it's not so dangerous to add, for instance,
a lot of chloride, to raise strontium
using strontium chloride.
After all, the saltwater in our tank has a lot of
sodium chloride in it, and that's what makes it saltwater.
So, you've decided you wanna do this,
where can you buy these chemicals?
Where else, online!
And one company that I've seen in a lot of threads
is Alpha Chemicals, but beyond that,
eBay, Amazon, you can buy these chemicals anywhere.
Be sure to buy something with a known purity,
and obviously you want the purity
to be as high as you can get,
but that said, the purity of trace elements
isn't hugely important, cause we're only
dosing a tiny amount of them in the first place,
so by the time you expand that out to your whole tank,
there's only gonna be a few micrograms
of whatever impurity that you would have,
if it's .01% lead, who cares?
Now, how much do you figure out, or how do you figure out
how much of these things to dose,
it's not difficult, you can just apply some basic math.
I mentioned molecular weights before.
Now, that's the weight of a molecule,
and you can use that to figure out
how much of the chemical you want to do,
you can compare it to the atomic mass.
You can divide the atomic mass by the molecular weight
to find out what percentage of the target element
is in that molecule by weight,
and then you can multiply it out to reach
whatever concentration you want.
It's particularly useful if you're trying
to compare a homemade solution to something
like a Seachem solution where it's listed
in milligrams per liter.
And then it's easy to multiply out your own values,
and make the same concentration,
and then you can just follow
the Seachem directions, for example.
A helpful conversion to remember
is that one part per million
is equal to one microgram per milliliter.
And, metric system being awesome like it is,
one microgram per milliliter
equals one milligram per liter.
Remember, don't remember that,
just go to Google, type in mg to ug
and you'll get the conversion.
So, that's all folks, I hope you have
good success with trace elements in your tank,
the only one I dose is iodine,
don't really have much of a problem with it,
but hope you found it interesting,
I hope you have a fantastic day
and I will see you next time, bye!