The Tank Booster Pack: Wholistic Reef Aquarium Balance

If AlgaeBarn is known for one thing, it is our focus on natural aquarium maintenance methods. Some of our products are designed to naturally maintain good water quality, while some are designed to provide excellent nutrition; in many cases, these goals overlap. In fact, there’s lots of overlap (and not merely by happy accident) in all of our economically-priced package deals. And this certainly is the case with the new-and-improved Tank Booster Pack!

As such, the individual products in the Tank Booster Pack are thoughtfully selected to remove nutrients and detritus as well as provide your fish and corals with a wholesome variety of live foods. What makes this package stand out from our other fine packages is that it is ecologically wide-ranging, representing every major part of the food web!

A complete ecological tool kit

The Tank Booster Pack is perfect for both new and well-established marine aquaria to remove/prevent the accumulation of detritus and excess nutrients, even while power-feeding a diverse collection of zooplanktivores and filter-feeders. Let’s face it: We tend to underfeed our animals for fear that we might degrade water quality, create nasty accumulations of unsightly organic wastes and promote the growth of nuisance algae. And these fears are not at all unfounded! Even with a powerful filter system and aggressive water change schedule, keeping up with feeding our hungry aquarium animals can easily lead to issues with pollution. Thankfully, we can counter these issues substantially by (1) utilizing biofiltration to control excess organics and dissolved nutrients, (2) employ a clean-up crew to consume particulate organic matter and (3) use live foods as to minimize input of wastes. The Tank Booster Pack excels on all points.

Here, we tackle nutrient spikes (and thereby prevent harmful algal blooms) with the use of both macroalgae (Clean Chaeto) and beneficial bacteria (PNS ProBio). Clean Chaeto (Chaetomorpha linum) has proven to be a highly effective and easily maintained refugium macroalgae. To boot, it is treated, quarantined, and maintained in its own system to remove any unwanted parasites and hitchhikers. Like many other heterotrophic bacteria, the anaerobic, photosynthetic purple non-sulfur bacterium in PNS ProBio (Rhodopseudomonas palustris) efficiently sequesters excess ammonia, nitrite, nitrate and phosphate to build biomass. However, unlike most other microbes, it additionally performs denitrification to obtain energy by converting nitrate to nitrogen gas. Better yet, it is capable of digesting dissolved organic matter in both aerobic and anaerobic environments.

But what about solid organic wastes (detritus, uneaten fish food, fish feces, small animal carcasses, etc.)? That’s a great task for ORA Captive Bred Cerith Snails! These hardy scavengers will eat almost any organic waste material, in addition to many undesirable types of algae, and therefore are an invaluable addition to your clean-up crew. These are more like the bulldozers of the crew; it is the five copepod species in Galaxy Pods (Tigriopus californicus, Tisbe biminiensis, Apocyclops panamensis, Oithona colcarva and Euterpina acutifrons) that finish the job with a fine-tooth comb. While all five species remove settled particulates from the tank floor, and all remove suspended particulates from the water column as planktonic larvae,  Apocyclops, Oithona and Euterpina additionally remove suspended particulates from the water column as adults. It’s worth noting here that in some applications, dense growths of chaeto can act as a mechanical filter, thereby trapping/concentrating solid organic matter in a refuge where pods can efficiently find it and devour it.

Finally, while all of these products help to boost your tank’s cleanliness, two of them–Galaxy Pods and PNS ProBio–also serve as excellent live foods. The miniscule young copepods make a nutritious meal for zooplanktivores such as corals while the adults are preyed on by small fishes such as mandarins, seahorses, anthias, dartfish and so on. The bacteria in PNS ProBio are shown to be an especially nutritious contribution to the bacterioplankton in wild reefs. In addition to acting as powerful probiotics, they are rich in protein (in some cases over 70%!), vitamins, fatty acids (especially stearic and oleic acid) as well as color-enhancing and antioxidant carotenoids. This makes them extremely nourishing not just to filter-feeding corals, clams, sponges, etc., but also to the copepods in Galaxy Pods!

Tank Booster Pack: Bigger tank, bigger deal

Like many of our package deals, the Tank Booster Pack increases savings with increasing package size. Here, we offer three different sizes to accommodate any system–nano or colossal! 

Our small pack includes:

• 1 Jar Galaxy Pods
• 1 Bottle PNS Probio
• 1 oz Chaetomorpha
• 10 Cerith Snails

This pack supports small tanks up to, say, 29 gallons of volume. For medium size tanks (say, anything from 29 to 120 gallons), we suggest the medium pack:

• 2 Jars Galaxy Pods
• 2 Bottles PNS Probio
• 2 oz. Chaetomorpha
• 20 Cerith Snails

Finally, for anything over 120 gallons, we recommend the large pack:

• 4 Jars Galaxy Pods
• 4 Bottles PNS Probio
• 4 oz. Chaetomorpha
• 40 Cerith Snails

Conclusion

True to our vision of a hobby powered by natural husbandry methods and captive bred livestock, the Tank Booster Pack is guaranteed to boost the overall health of your captive environment. And at a package deal price! Given its food web-wide benefits, it is truly a care package to show your whole aquarium community some love!