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What
is the nitrogen cycle? Is it in my tank? Is it good for my fish? These are
all questions I have heard from beginning fish keepers. And I hope to
answer all of these questions in my article.
So you
want to know what’s going on inside that filter on you tank. After
all the filter should be making everything look and run perfectly, it
filters the water right? Well not all filters are equal, and every filter
needs some time to really get working just right. When you think of filters
in every day life you normally think about air filters and water filters,
but fish tank filters work very much like every other filter you have seen.
Most filters have three main components, mechanical filtration, chemical
filtration and biological filtration. When we start taking about the
nitrogen cycle were talking about biological filtration.
Biological
filtration works on the premise that certain bacteria eat certain chemicals
in the water, normally the waste products of your fish and left over food,
and convert these harmful chemicals into less harmful chemicals. No one
really wants harmful chemicals to kill their fish so Biological filtration
is the way to go. All tanks have Biological filtration in them.
That’s why you get a white cloudy tank when you first set it up. The
white foggy tank is the bacteria of the biological filtration growing and
working.
So
lets go through the process step by step. First you wake up in the morning
and feed your fish, yum, the fish love the food and eat to their hearts
content. As they digest the food they excrete urine into the water and any
excess food that’s floating around begins to breakdown into peptides
and amino acids and becomes ammonia (NH3). Notice that Ammonia has nitrogen
in it (The “N” in NH3)? This means that it’s a
nitrogen-bearing compound and can be broken down into a simpler substance
by nitrosomas bacteria. That was a bunch of chemistry and stuff so lets
make it simple, fish waste becomes ammonia and that can kill the fish.
There is a bacterium that eats the ammonia and makes it less lethal. Easy
right? Good. Now this bacteria breaks ammonia down into Nitrite (NO2) so
lets talk about Nitrite (NO2).
Nitrite
(NO2) is also lethal to fish but it takes larger quantities to really hurt
the fish. Of course there must be a way to get rid of it right? More
bacteria called Nitrobacta bacteria. Now remember that Ammonia had nitrogen
in it well so does Nitrite (NO2). This bacterium breaks down Nitrite (NO2)
to Nitrate (NO3). Yes your fish have just eaten some food and with the help
of some little bacteria they have created the end product of the nitrogen
cycle Nitrate.
Nitrate
isn’t great for your livestock either but you can get it out of the
tank by using many different methods. You should remove some of the water
and add clean water there by removing nitrate and diluting the nitrate left
in the tank. This is one of the best ways to keep the tank healthy. But
other things can be used to help keep that nitrate from becoming a problem,
there are chemical filter medias on the market that will absorb the nitrate
and plants also use it as a food. Plants use nitrate as a food source and
so so water changes are one way to cut back on the amount of nitrates
available to algae in your aquarium.
Now
you have just started the nitrogen cycle by adding some food to the fish
tank and that food gets broken down from Ammonia to Nitrite to Nitrate. And
this happens all the time in every fish tank. Countless numbers of bacteria
eating the waste products of fish and breaking it down into less and less
lethal forms. That is the nitrogen cycle in its simplest form.
Where,
oh where could all of this be happening? Well in the substrate of your
tank, or in the live rock of a saltwater tank just about anywhere where the
bacteria can live, of course the most common place is in your filter on any
surface that the bacteria will grow.
Of
course this leads to other aspects of filtration and how to keep your tanks
clean, so be sure to look for the next installment of tanked where we will
talk about filters big and small and how they work.
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