There should be a "Defend the ATS in this other thread" forum.

[M I N I O N]

Do you have any pictures of your tank? With all of my SPS, I closely monitor calcium, alkalinity and magnesium but I recently got a calcium reactor to take care of all of that so I only have to test every month about to make adjustments for growth. I have pretty much stopped testing nitrate but I do still test phosphate every couple of weeks.

[M I N I O N]

Google 'Spongodes montipora', the polyps ARE brown. LOL. I used to think like you are thinking many years ago, then I learned better and stopped listening to the 'experts' and started listening to my tank.

Bottom line, corals adapt, but corals do NOT like big changes in anything. If I drop my phosphates from .5 down to .03, the corals will bleach out (due to not enough food), if I raise my phosphates from .03 to .5, my corals will brown out (due to too much food, making the zooxanthallae populations explode, which is what gives corals the brown color), if I let corals adapt over time to .5 phosphates, they color up and look fantastic. Zooxanthallae is algae, and algae eats N/P, right? It all comes down to finding a good balance in the tank, whatever methods a person decides to use. There is no right or wrong way to run a reef tank as long as whatever method you choose works.

This is what my 75G used to look like, running a skimmer, reactor, and caulerpa for filtration, before I got into ATS's.

Very nice! How are you maintaining phosphate at 0.5 now with the ATS? Is nitrate a limiter in your tank now holding you there? How are you keep cyano and nuisance algae out of the display?

[Ace25]

Very nice! How are you maintaining phosphate at 0.5 now with the ATS? Is nitrate a limiter in your tank now holding you there? How are you keep cyano and nuisance algae out of the display?

My 60G tank (one in the video on the previous page) seems to have found a balance on its own and for whatever reason that balance seems to have leveled off at 0 nitrates and .5 phosphates (yes, nitrates are the limiter). One thing I believe that helps is a large coral load. There is more algae in the corals than what my screen can grow in a week, so I believe it is actually my corals doing most of the filtering in the tank, the ATS just picks up the little left over. I get cyano growing on the back wall, but no where else. I leave the cyano because you can't really see it against a black background and it is also a great piece of filtration. It is only when cyano covers the sand, rocks, corals, that it becomes an issue for me, and my 60G tank has never had that. I have a diamond goby that keeps the sandbed clean and a good size clean up crew to keep the rocks clean.

The 75G tank above, I gave up on it and turned it into a 'coral eating fish tank' by putting a butterfly and a pair of orange spot filefish in it. There are still a lot of corals in that tank but I no longer focus on coral health in it, I focus on keeping 'expert only' and 'do not ever attempt' type of fish in that tank just because I like the challenge. I am now trying to breed my filefish pair. Anyone who has ever tried those type of fish know it isn't conducive to keeping healthy corals because you have to feed the tank 5-10 times a day for those fish and provide live SPS corals for them to pick on between feedings.

This is what the 75G looks like today, the acros are all wild ones that a friend was going to toss in the trash (because they are ugly) so I took them to be used as food and sleeping locations for the filefish. They have actually grown/quadrupled in size since I got them.