Quote:
Originally Posted by Dan_P
Why don’t we know how much biomass is exported? Even public and commercial aquariums don’t know?
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I don't know of any way to measure it, in practice. It can leave the tank (or nutrient flow, at least) in a number of ways. The various components of the biomass can be skimmed or be exported via water changes, denitrification, outgassed as carbon dioxide, or deposited as phosphate, etc, in coral skeletons or coralline. The last case isn't technically export from the system, but it does remove the nutrients from the nutrient flow in the tank, at least for some period of time.
A lot of things can be skimmed, and characterizing what comes out of the skimmer back into what was in the tank would be non-trivial, in my opinion. One guess is that carbon dosing removes nutrients by feeding bacteria that release skimmable organics. It's also likely that at least some of the carbon is consumed by bacteria that are themselves skimmed, but I don't know how much that would be.