Quote:
Originally Posted by asylumdown
Carbon dosing has it's risks, benefits, proponents, and adamant detractors. There's hundreds of threads on all the forums about it. The risk, is that cyanobacteria assemblages also contain clades of heterotrophic bacteria which are just as good (if not better because of their commensal associations) at consuming excess organic carbon, so if cyano is present and nitrate is high, it's possible to cause a cyano explosion by starting an organic carbon dosing regiment. Paradoxically, it's exactly the effect the method is attempting produce (cyano is a bacteria that consumes lots and lots of nutrients after all), it's just not the right effect. The challenge with carbon dosing is getting the heterotrophic bacteria you can't see as a gross red slime covering everything to become dominant, then managing it in such a way that leaves enough nutrient in the water for your corals. That's not always easy to do, which is where I think a lot of the detractors come from.
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You know, controlling nitrates (with bio pellets) and preventing cyano is actually very, very simple. That is, if you use Brightwell's MB7. Very cheap, and helps make your water and tank look very clean. As I reported earlier in this thread, and on others, I have not had a cyano problem since I started using this a couple years ago.
It is almost frustrating for me to keep seeing these threads about cyano (and bio pellet issues) and how academically complicated this issue is, when in reality it is so simple and easy to control, from a practical user perspective. There may be other remedies, but I do know that MB7 is a sure fire one.