Ceramic as seen in this photo. Sat in sump for a cpl months before transfer. Been as how you see them under the lights with corals growing on them around 3-4 months.
I didn’t read the post but the Hanna checker is freshwater correct?
I don't mean the topic is recent, but the discussion became refueled recently about the toxicity of nitrite and whether or not it is important to measure it specifically. Although there is long-term history behind the basic understanding, there seems to be recent controversy on importance of nitrite considerations and measurements specifically. If you read the linked threads and the contents of this thread, I think you will understand what I mean.
Yes and based on Nesslers reagent - not the best method for saltwater
I just thinking the same thing as to transferring media is a completely different thing from starting with sterile rock, water and sand.
I try a last time. Because fully cycled is defined by that the nitrification process should happens seamless it was cycled minute 1 because you introduce a huge amount of biofilm that had the capacity to process the load from your 4 fish . Basically you only change the water and the shell around an already functional ecosystem. If you had introduce 50 fish and higher food input - it is not sure that the tank was fully cycled because the biomass of the biofilm may be to low for processing all of the produced NH4 even if the corals would help you to lower the load of NH4. Once again this is not new findings I have done it since the seventies
Dan, did you ever see anything that showed a surface area limit to the nitrifier population? Everything I saw starting up my dry sand mini tanks with biospira was that as I kept adding ammonia, the nitrification rate of a few mL of surface sand kept going up.
fish don't make up their own ammonia, right? they use the N from food and we can ballpark ~80% of it gets re-released as ammonia. I think It's much easier to count the N going in from food (measure mass, read labels) , than to try to account for the N release by body mass of fish+inverts. right?
Yeah one tank has to be something simple that any reefer can duplicate.
Got it. The biofilm on those tiles is probably nothing like the sterile surface of a new system. I want to but have yet to see what happens when Bio-Spira meets such a surface. My guess is it will not do well. Those ceramic times might consume ammonia but produce no nitrite or nitrate. I have yet to grow a nitrifying biofilm on a clean surface by placing it in my aquarium.Ceramic as seen in this photo. Sat in sump for a cpl months before transfer. Been as how you see them under the lights with corals growing on them around 3-4 months.
Dont mind how dirty they look thats just how dirty the filters im using makes them appear. They do have coraline growing on them. I can also throw a few shrooms with rubble thats been in system around 2.5 years.
Media from an established aquarium might not be a suitable surface for nitrifying bacteria to colonize. I am still trying to sort this out though. You might find that the cultured tiles don’t take up much ammonia. If you try though, I ‘d be interested in what you observe. You don’t have to set up an aquarium. Just a container big enough to hold the tiles, and cover them with water and aerate. I found that established biofilms can be disturbed by a change in water, say aquarium water to Instant Ocean, and will start producing ammonia. So do the experiment in ammonia spiked water from where the tiles came from.
I have not pushed my biofilms to see if they max out. Still trying to get my biofilm on glass to catch up to biofilm on aragonite, which is kinda like trying to max it out. Definitely will look at that next.
Its more sensitive than most people think but how important it is another question. In a total new aquarium - the only ammonia producer is the fish (if you start with a fish like I do) In a well established aquarium the breakdown of organic matter by the heterotrophic bacteria is more important for the ammonia production on daily bases than the fish - IMO. That´s important because the most ammonia production from fish is around 15 - 120 minutes post feeding but the ammonia production from heterotrophic bacteria is 7/24/365. In my aquarium with a high load of photosynthetic bacteria and reversed photo period for my refugium an ammonia molecule probably have a rather low surviving period. But there is a lot of FO aquarium out there that not get help from photosynthetic organisms. Because that I have followed my NO2 concentrations for a while (with Hanna nitrite checker and Lab analyses) I have seen that my NO2 concentration vary between 0 and 0.05. I have also a denitrification filter in my aquarium - hence a risk for NO2 spill from incomplete denitrification. The second step is the most sensitive in the process and variation in the NO2 concentration can indicate the health of an aquariums microbiological ecosystem - IMO
What do you think about the following? NO2 can be present if there is a sudden burst of ammonia oxidation and the nitrite oxidizing bacteria cannot keep up (in saltwater they seem to grow more slowly than the ammonia oxidizers). The other possibility is there is no burst in ammonia oxidation but something is affecting nitrite oxidation. Which might be the more likely reason for the presence of NO2 In an aquarium?
I keep seeing this picture of Ric’s and Shroom’s…let’s get some difficult Acro’s in that tank and put it to the test.Ceramic as seen in this photo. Sat in sump for a cpl months before transfer. Been as how you see them under the lights with corals growing on them around 3-4 months.
Dont mind how dirty they look thats just how dirty the filters im using makes them appear. They do have coraline growing on them. I can also throw a few shrooms with rubble thats been in system around 2.5 years.
The first mechanism absolutely happens. Usually, when I challenge some nitrifying material with ammonia - the ammonia oxidizers respond first and there is a lag of multiple days during which nitrite is measurable - before the nitrite oxidizers catch up. This doesn't always happen though. Sometimes if the ammonia challenge is low enough, nitrite oxidiation capability stays caught up and NO2 is not observed though ammonia drops and NO3 increases.
Good reminder about Aquabiomic findings. I imagine, but don’t know for sure, that the AOB and NOB bacteria co-exist in the same biofilm. If this is true, I don’t understand how AOB but not NOB are detected. Is there another bacteria in the biofilm that uses NO2 faster than NOB organisms? I might try placing a nitrifying biofilm into the aquarium and monitor what happens to its NOB activity.
good questions. I feel safe arguing that nature is going to demand that NOB populations cluster around the locations where the Nitrite is generated (so ought to be tight correlations with AOB).
I'm thinking 10 gallons. If we can put solid #'s to the questions asked we should have at least a good base we can scale up from.
I'm taking corals from recent instastock shroom lagoon tank. This tank recently went through full system transfer and is what got me thinking about all this to begin with. I'm seeing some pretty amazing things with this transfer tank that im hoping to replicate with a brand new start up tank.
Thast´s the normal explanation and I know that it is true even at a given and stable load of ammonia. We can´t see this is in aquaria because our measurements tools are not sensitive enough. However - I have measure the ammonia and nitrite oxidation in several fish farms - hour for hours during 24 hours cycle. The pattern was this. Feed start 8:00 and continue to 20:00 - feed frequency - every 10 minutes. Ammonia start to rise around 1/2 hour after first feed and rise during the whole day till around 1/2 an hour after the last feed slowly going down to the same amount as the day before at 08:00. Nitrite follow the same cycle but around another 1/2 hour later than the ammonia graph. At 21:00 nitrite start to drop till it at 08:00 the next day was the same as the day before normal 0 for both parameters. Because the feeding only was between 8 - 20 we could not get down the concentrations to zero during feeding time. The population of nitrifier was determined of the whole load of food in 24 hours
NOB can be species that´s not is sequenced yet hence you can´t see them. I do not no which species DNA the analyze use. I know of two different families of NOB - nitrobacter and nitrospira. There can be more. These families consist of many different species of which there may be many where the genome is not sequenced
This is the base for my 15 steps - i have observed this for many years. This is the safest method in order to establish a good nitrification cycle (cycle the aquarium) You get a seamless transition - and you can increase the load a little a day and it will still be seamless. This is the reason why I´m against this ideas with adding a lot of ammonia day 1, 3 and so on. It is only create a stalled nitrification cycle. If you want to do it the chemical way - add trace amounts of ammonia and rise it very little each third day. If you want to do it with fish - follow the 15 steps
