Coral

just FYI

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Fauna Marin’s Ultra-Life Water Purification

A few weeks ago I added Fauna Marin’s Ultra-Life water purification power to my FM regimen. It’s a very fine powder that can be used to assist in delivery of the amino acids (UltraMin S, UltraAMIN, etc.) to the animals and to help skimming, in that pollutants will bind to the Ultra-Life (which I believe may be some sort of clay, maybe Kaolinite?) to then be skimmed out.

Half-dose of the straight AA’s (Ultra-MinS & UltraAMIN) goes right to the tank, then I wait a little while because I usually see a feeding response shortly after dosing, maybe 10 - 15 minutes. While waiting, I add the remaining doses of Min S / AMIN to the Ultra-Life powder in a tiny amount of RO/DI water, let it soak for a bit before adding a little more RO/DI so I can squirt it around the tank in hopes that the amino acid soaked particles have a better chance of getting trapped & utilized by the corals.

I also tend to (over)feed heavily - fatty oily foods like Rod’s Food, Cyclop-eeze, oyster egg & phyto concoctions, soak in Selcon, garlic extraction, you name it. I rotate what I feed and I keep my fish plump. Not fat, but I make sure they’re well fed. Normally when I feed something like Rod’s Food the skimmer foam dies down and takes some time to regain decent production. With the Ultra-Life, it seems that not only does the foam regain its head in less time, it doubles production. I’ll take some photos soon, before and after, it’s pretty sick.

Fauna Marin claims Ultra-Life also binds ammonia, nitrite & nitrate. I have no detectable levels of NO3 anyway, and I don’t test for the other two, but I can say at least the NO3 hasn’t gone up. Regardless of whether using the Ultralith system or not, I think Ultra-Life could probably find a place in any reef tank. I’d be interested to hear results in terms of NO3 reduction using just the Ultra-Life.

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