Hi all,
Plants aren't going to provide a source of ammonia, be great if they did save a fortune on EI chemicals.
Yes that is really the point, plants deplete ammonia and you don't need to add ammonia to cycle the tank, because you are never solely reliant on the microbial filtration in the filter, and you will never again have ammonia levels anything like as high as the amount you've added.
Low ammonia loadings encourage the formation of a diverse microbial assemblage, and it is this diversity that produces a resilient and flexible response to fluctuating nutrient levels, basically you haven't put all your eggs in one basket. There are links to some references in this thread <"
Siporax vs.......">.
To perform his second tests to evaluate cycling he actually doses the tanks with ammonium chloride
Yes these aren't planted tanks, so are reliant on microbial filtration, he talks about planted tanks in this article, <"
Aquatic plants......"> it is from 1997, so that it pre-dates the use of DNA libraries.
The prime metric in nitrification isn't actually the ammonia concentration, it is the dissolved oxygen level. As you have water with greater amounts of organic pollution its Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD) increases, BOD values range from clean water at below 5 mg/l dissolved oxygen up to about 600 mg/L in raw sewage. Water is fully saturated with oxygen at about 10 mg/L, so you can see that you would need to continually add oxygen for nitrification to occur. Sewage works do this via the <"
Activated Sludge"> process (below).
Photo by John Rostron, CC BY-SA 2.0, <
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14228830>
<"
Plant/microbe filtration"> is much more effective than microbe only filtration, and can deal with huge bioloads. The plants take up all forms of fixed nitrogen (including ammonia), are net oxygen producers and provide a much larger area for nitrification to occur in the substrate.
cheers Darrel