Which salt to use?

[adamRS80]

I've got a bag of Aquacraft Marine Environment, and Biosea Marinemix. I'm switching from instant ocean. I thought I remembered some people having trouble with one of these. Which one should I use?

[adamRS80]

anybody else? gotta get this water change done.

[Nano_Steve]

well considering instant ocean kills animals when mixed with marinemix(like josh said) i would most likely go with the other. :)

just my thoughts, steve

[adamRS80]

Now I'm scared to death. Is my tank going to be toast tomorrow? Anybody else want to chime in. Is it a bad idea to switch in the first place?

[captexas]

Probably do a search on Reefcentral. I know a few people have switched salts here though. If I remember correctly it mostly results in SPS corals bleaching out.

[adamRS80]

Anybody want to buy some salt? I'm sticking with Instant Ocean.

[JimD]

Why did you wnat to switch in the frst place? Just curious. Ill take that nasty BioSea stuff off yer hands. :-)

[alexwolf]

I have heard instant ocean is the best, ask Instar hes the one who explained it to me, but i cant remember a thing about it

[robertpower3]

Why is instant ocean the best? I've heard it is a good salt but I personally don't use it.

[Yano]

Something wrong with it? I use it all the time, no probs here.

[matt]

Here we go....the great salt controversy take 2! A little background is appropriate at this point. Ron Shimek suspected there might be toxic levels of heavy metals (as opposed to toxic levels of heavy metal, which many of my students seem to suffer from) in commercial salt mix. So he did a two-part study. One, he obtained analyses of several popular salt mixes. The results indicated elevated levels of several toxins in I.O. Two, he did a test which involved urchin larvae survival rates in batches of several different commercial salt mixes. Urchin larvae are often used in bio-testing due to their sensitivity to toxins and pollutants. The I.O. batch had very poor survival rates.

Okay, so the results indicated that Crystal Sea Marine Mix bio-assay salt was "better" for aquariums due to 1. Stated lower levels of several toxic metals and 2. Much higher survival of urchin larvae. This could have profound influence on deep sand bed function, which depends on the survival and reproduction(hence the importance of larvae survival) of a diverse invertibrate population.

So, many people switched from I.O. to C.S. and some of these people experienced rapid bleaching of their corals, sparking what must have been the longest thread in reefcentral history. I was one of the people who switched, and did not experience significant bleaching. (one frag in my tank out of many colonies) But, I made the switch very gradually, and my system had only been up and running for about a year.

There were tons of ideas and speculations about this. The "leading" one, made by Randy Holmes-Farley and others, was that chelators (binding agents) present in I.O. bound some of the toxic metals present in the salt, and that the introduction of C.S. somehow interfered with those bonds, releasing some of the toxic stuff (copper was the main suspect) into the water column and causing the bleaching. None of this stuff was ever proven, at least by the time i stopped following the thread. It's still going on; it's called "Crystal seas Marine Mix causes bleaching" or something like that. If you have a week or two to burn, check it out!

Now, my current system is C.S. and I really like it. It's important to note here that the truth or falsehood of the claims of superiority of these salts will only become evident in systems that are old; the whole reason Shimek got interested in this was because of a slow build up of toxic metals in his (and other) aquariums over several years. This is why people who say something like "I use salt X and my tank looks great, therefore salt X rules" are missing the whole point. It's about what will happen to your rock and sand bed over 5-10 years or more.

BTW, if you don't want the bio-assay salt, I'll buy it from you, but I would suggest you use it, if you're planning on keeping your system for several years, and you have a deep sand bed. Just switch very slowly at first, and if you have some problems with your animals, I guess you'd have to bale on the idea.

Whew, that's a long post. Let the salt battles begin, arrggghhh!

[captexas]

Excellent explanation Matt! :-)

[GaryP]

I use Red Sea Salt. Its made primarily from evaporated sea water instead of a mixture of various salts.

Gary

[Jimnorris]

I will take the Marine Eviroment salt. IMO it is the best salt I have ever used!
Jim

[samz]

I will have to agree with Jim. Since I started using Marine Environment salt, my tank has thrived.

[DeletedAccount]

But where in the world do you buy your Marine Environment salt?

[Sherri]

I use Kent??????????????? Anthing I need to know? :)

[samz]

Thanks Joshua.

Jim has always been nice enough to help me out with this salt. He is awesome!

[Tim Marvin]

I used a few cases of the marine invironment. Didn't notice anything better. I'm back to Kent and IO. Of course I don't keep the same system up for 5 years either. Things go in and out and new rock is put in.

[Instar]

Since the great salt controvery usually quotes an article of Ron Shimek, I feel compelled to chime in here. Ron Shimek also wrote another article about the source of toxic build up that reaches the critical point at the 2 year mark of a tank and between 2 and 4 years those toxins will kill most things in the tank. The source for the toxins in that article was not metals in the artificial salt mixes, but, rather it was from the foods we feed the fish and the breakdown of waste products in the system. One article opposes the other.
In regard to the article on salt mixes: One of the tests with the metals in the salt was with larval shrimp. Larval shrimp had poor survival rates with one salt over another. From that is was determined that there were chelators in the IO salt mix that were harmful to larval shrimp. I have raised one type of the lysmata shrimp in IO but have noticed that it makes a difference if I change water from a freshly mixed batch vs changing from one of my reefs. After spending many hours figuring out what concentration is what in which, I found two salts that were identical to seawater in their major elements: Instant Ocean (IO) and HW Marinemix. After briefly looking at bioassy, I decided against it. Most salts have many times more concentration of trace elements than seawater. Again, the two that have the balance as close to seawater in proportions were the IO and HW Marinemix. The rest of them varied. I want a salt mix that has the major elements as close to sea water as possible. Traces I can add. The alleged chelators can be removed with activated carbon filtration if you have a reason that you need to do that. I always run carbon on my 125 reef tank now since it has been set up for a year. It has always had IO, nothing else. I am not changing to anything else unless it would be HW Marinemix, but, that is harder to get and more expensive. In recent times I have not noticed any difference with the two in their ability to support life in all forms. Again, I have been breeding and raising things of different types and see no reason to change at this point in time. I have seen negative effects of the other salts in colors and ability to sustain life. I recently had 50% of the corals I got from a bioassy salt person that died in a perfectly healthy reef tank and the ones that lived, one is almost totally bleached white. On the other hand, I got frags from Jim's tank and they are just simply awesome. Since one place had poor survival rates and Jim's was so perfect, to me this is a negative "test" result for the bioassy. I call it negative, because the results are not predictable to me. Now there is a danger to changing in an established system. If you started with IO, stay with it. There have been many people that killed their tanks when they switched from IO to the bioassy salt. I have switched back and forth in one other tank between IO, Kent and HW Marinemix salts with great results. As for the articles about toxic metals, that is unproven: I see no reason to jump on a band wagon after some series of articles in a magazine and posts on a BBS (regardless of who wrote them). Those two things don't prove anything. If you decide to use the bioassay mix, start out with it in a new tank, not an established one. Then you have to consider: do you like the colors and results of Jim Norris and Tim Marvin. Each makes a compelling case; one for IO and the other for bioassay. The trouble with all this is that all of the tanks on the Reef Central tank of the month have only one thing in common: LIGHTING. All the rest of the parameters; temperature, treatments, chemistry, salt mixes - it all varies to from some degree to a lot. If you are raising something that you think will truly be harmed by something in IO, then you can always run the salt mix through activated carbon. Almost all of the really great looking sps tanks that are over 5 years old on tank of the month on Reef Central are running carbon and using IO. I think that you can have great success with many different salt mixes and that the basic salt is not nearly as important as what you dose and feed your reef as well as how well you maintain it. After its 2 years old, water changes must be periodically increased to reduce toxic waste metabolites. Refugiums with macro algae in them seem to play a major role in the reduction of toxic waste byproducts in a system. The trouble with articles and the sponsors who pay for them is that these tests are not conducted over a 5 or 10 year span and that really makes the results inconclusive and quite possibly very wrong.
Sherri Nothing to worry about. Kent has been a reliable salt mix. I beleive IO still owns Kent anyway.

[matt]

Since the great salt controvery usually quotes an article of Ron Shimek, I feel compelled to chime in here. Ron Shimek also wrote another article about the source of toxic build up that reaches the critical point at the 2 year mark of a tank and between 2 and 4 years those toxins will kill most things in the tank. The source for the toxins in that article was not metals in the artificial salt mixes, but, rather it was from the foods we feed the fish and the breakdown of waste products in the system. One article opposes the other.
.

Larry;

Which article are you referring to here? I'd like to read it. I think Randy Holmes-Farley wrote an article discussing import of toxic metals from foods, but I don't remember seeing anything Shimek wrote on this. I don't actively search for his writing, so I probably missed it. BTW, something I did read by Shimek discussing export of toxins basically says that aquarists should use all available means of export all the time, especially constant aggressive skimming. Of course, the fact that I build a few skimmers has NO INFLUENCE WHATSOEVER in me saying this, hehe..

Matt

[Instar]

Don't have the reference. I think sometimes that I should make an index for these things, but, usually when I am reading them I am at work during a slow time. Can't save stuff to this computer. It was on a web site journal that I read a couple weeks ago. Ron was responding to a question/answer message string at the end of the article. I haven't seen the one by Farley-Holmes. Do you have a reference for that?
I believe in using skimmers. Trouble is heavy metals aren't part of the skimmate goo unless they are bound in the protein or part of a skimmed radical like phosphate (PO4), and they don't normally exist in a bond with protein. Lead, Mercury, Arsenic, Tin to name a few, won't get skimmed. Copper won't unless its Copper Sulfate and I suspect that copper pollution is not that.

[GaryP]

Here you go. I had it bookmarked.

http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2003-03/rs/feature/index.htm

Gary

[matt]

Thanks, Gary. That's the article which sparked many people switching from I.O. to C.S. bio-assay. Here's the one by Shimek in which he discussed forms of export, both inorganic (metals) and organic.

http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2002-12/rs/feature/index.htm

Here's the one by Randy Holmes-Farley I was talking about.

http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2003-04/rhf/feature/index.htm

[GaryP]

Matt,

I had read Shimek's article about export but failed to bookmark it. I solved that. Thanks.

I use the Xenia export method. Anyone want some? Hehehehe! I have to keep thinning it out or it will overgrow my corals. I'll have a bunch of mounted frags at the next meeting.

Gary

[matt]

If you have enough space to grow ALOT of xenia, and are willing to shell out for the light to make it grow fast, it can apparently be a pretty good nutrient/metal export. Caulerpa, while containing less metals by weight, grows much faster in a typical refugium. Still, I think people tend to overestimate the ability of a small caulerpa refugium to sequester nutrients and metals from the water. I guess the closest I came to having a big refugium was the 5 1/2 gal caulerpa refugium on my old 10 gal nano. In that system, I had trouble keeping caulerpa growing; it would periodically crash. In my 100 gal system, I have about a 10 gal refugium; proportionally a MUCH smaller volume, and so less of an efficient export. But, with regards to Shimek's article, constant skimming is still the most efficient. I have a big skimmer; hopefully between that, the caulerpa, and the bio-assay salt, I'll be relatively low in metal accumulation for several years.

[brewercm]

Way over my head here but, I've had my system up and running for a little over 4 years now and have used IO, Kent and C.S. and have had no massive die off. I did change over from CC ro LR about a year ago and have never changed any of the LR just added pieces here and there. Also this was changed over from FOWLR to Reef about a year ago, but haven't been keeping any SPS as of yet. I will say that with all three salts for some reason my algae growth appears to be less with C.S. than the other two. The one thing about the C.S. is it doesn't appear to disolve as quick or as complete as the other two.
No expert here just what I've seen over the years.

[GaryP]

zzmstt,

You are correct about the growth rate of Xenia vs. Caulerpa. I was mainly kidding about it, but I feel that it can't hurt. A Caulerpa refugium is the next thing on my list of projects. The Shimek article was based on the amount of heavy metals on a pound for pound basis. I doubt you could ever get Xenia to grow as fast as Caulerpa. I do have a lot of Xenia in my tank though. Eventually the back wall will be completely covered in it which I feel is the appropriate place for it. In the meantime I just keep harvesting it off the LR and giving it away.

At one time I was taking it to a LFS for shop credit. It just about supported my maintenance costs. Between the Xenia and some fast growing (and very brittle) Montipora digitata I was doing about $100 per month in shop credits. Unfrotunately I eventually saturated the market with Xenia frags.

Gary

[matt]

Yeah, I remember giving Troy a tiny piece of xenia "back in the day" and eventually he was selling gobs of the stuff. It totally took over my previous tank; only when I scrubbed every piece of liverock did I get it under control. Now time to do the same for this pesky grape caulerpa.

I think if you have the light, space, and a high ph, you could have a pretty successful xenia refugium. It would certainly be beautiful, maybe like a 40 breeder next to a large reef tank.

[Richard]

Ok this is an old thread but I just read it and am confused about something. Maybe someone can make me understand.

Question was...Any problems switching to Bio-Sea MarineMix or Marine Environment (both made by Aquacraft right?)

Josh said... Crystal Sea MarineMix Bioassay kills stuff when mixed with IO (OK got that)

xien2000corp said...well considering instant ocean kills animals when mixed with marinemix(like josh said) i would most likely go with the other.

My question, Aren't 2 different salts(Bio-Sea Marinemix and Crystal Sea MarineMix Bioassay) being confused in the conversation or is it just me that is confused.
So are there reports of problems with the Bio-Sea Marinemix or just the Crystal Sea stuff?

[Derek B]

I use Biosea and love it. About the same price as IO and I get it from Premium Aquatics.