Feeding with skimmate

I just read a post from someone in the filtration forum that when they clean out their skimmer they put a teaspoon of skim mate back into their DT to feed the corals. Does anyone else do this? What is your experience?

 

never heard anything like that, interested to know if it really helps anyways. if so, purpose skimmer becomes obsolete ??

 

I was thinking the same thing but the guy who posted said his corals "go crazy" for it when he feeds them. Just wanted to hear others ideas and experience since I'm a noob.

 

I can't say for sure, but it would seem that you are just re introducing decomposing waste back into the system. Sure, there is some phyto in the skimmate, but most is just grossness. If you wanted to feed phyto, there are a lot of high quality purer products than your skim would be.

 

+1 Atticus818

 

I've never heard of this, but I agree - seems pointless. Just putting the crap you pulled out of your aquarium right back in.

On that note, however, I have heard of using skimmate as a fetilizer for plants. I use it on my girlfriends flowerbed. I just won't use it on veggies or fruits...I don't like the idea of feeding my plants with dissolved fish-poo (though I guess it's really no worse than using manuer )

 

Probably depends on what form of nutrients the corals need. It's not really safe to assume that corals can consume any source of nutrition. Corals will have specific enzymes, to break down specific food sources. For example, bacteria is a common food source in nature, but decaying food probably isn't, so, it seems reasonable that corals may consume bacteria but not decaying fish food. If the skimmer collects lots of decaying food, this may provide a dense food source for bacteria, resulting in a dense culture of bacteria. So, then adding the skimmate back, may be a good source of bacterioplankton. It's possible some corals may be better equipped to consume this source, compared to the raw material going into the skimmer.

Whether it actually works this way or not, I don't know, but there is certainly theoretical reason why it may. Some people seem to think it does, idk...

 

Seems like it would do more harm than good. Why not just get a smaller skimmer?

 

good points m2434. Im not going to put any of that crap back into my tank since its doing just fine the way it is. I just wanted to hear if anyone had a reasonable explanation as to why someone may decide to two this. Thats the best one i ve heard yet but certainly not enough to convince me to do it.

 

Forum:

Just an observation ...Just the other day while doing maintenance in my sump i accidentally dropped the bottle brush i was using to clean the inside of my vertec skimmer's chamber and well the corals were let say HUGE! for about a day or so before returning to normal the minimal amount of skimate seemed to have an affect on the corals for sure....


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