Can cyanobacteria lead to increased nitrates?
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Daniel@R2R
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Agreed. This is my understanding as well. I believe nitrates feed cyano. However, I'm far from an expert. Let's see if anyone in the #reefsquad might know.
MrDLHughesY
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I agree also if you have a lot of cyano then nitrates can be a pain to read as they hold them and they can be hard to trace.
That's a good question. I would guess, haven't measured, that if you had a large amount of cyano in a tank and nuked it with chemiclean , that you might see a bump in nitrates.
It's not always clear why cyanobacteria shows up. It can use nitrogen gas, so it doesn't necessarily need high levels of nitrate in water to grow.
That being said, I wouldn't worry about cyano adding N to a system. Most nitrate problems in our sw tanks are in either new tanks (<1 year?) without enough rock OR, in less frequent cases, tanks that are overstocked with big messy eaters...eels, lions, big tangs, big Angel's, etc. The tanks I now personally deal with, I can't ever get nitrate to rise permanently, and there is usually some cyano here and there.
It's not always clear why cyanobacteria shows up. It can use nitrogen gas, so it doesn't necessarily need high levels of nitrate in water to grow.
That being said, I wouldn't worry about cyano adding N to a system. Most nitrate problems in our sw tanks are in either new tanks (<1 year?) without enough rock OR, in less frequent cases, tanks that are overstocked with big messy eaters...eels, lions, big tangs, big Angel's, etc. The tanks I now personally deal with, I can't ever get nitrate to rise permanently, and there is usually some cyano here and there.
beaslbob
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From what I hear it's low nitrates that lead to cyano. Because cyano uses nitrogen gas for nitrogen.
If you kill the lights and the cyano dies off then yes nitrates would be returned to the system.
my .02
If you kill the lights and the cyano dies off then yes nitrates would be returned to the system.
my .02
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Fixing nitrogen is energetically very expensive. Cyanobacteria do not fix nitrogen and spew it out. Also, cyanobacteria in an aquarium don’t need to fix nitrogen because all aquaria are really water treatment systems. There is always enough nitrogen around to grow cyanobacteria and inhibit nitrogen fixation.
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