Ammonia is our Friend: thoughts needed

[Harpo]

Double post

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Wont the addition of consumers inherently bring producers? If corals see benefits from bacteria, i would think adding the consumers without producers would ultimately lead to unhealthy corals.

It seems the villifying of ammonia is already a dead wives tale as its at least as good as, if not better than dosing nitrate. I guess my main question is what are you trying to prove or solve from a hobbyist perspective or is this completely for experimentation?

In an established tank, adding a piece of dry rock results in an ugly phase for that dry rock. How do you expect to have an algae resistant surface in a tank with limited consumption or do you plan on having a pile of coral and coraline in some water? Where will phosphates come from, marine food or dosed? I could be way off base with these questions but half the time I have to study an entire topic to understand a few basic concepts from your posts. Your off the beaten path ones throw me for a major loop.

Yes, adding anything alive will bring bacteria of all sorts, and I'm not trying to stop it. Just trying to defocus folks from obsessing about bacteria and nitrification during tank setup. Bacteria obviously play many different and important roles for corals and reef tanks overall. The goal is not a bacteria free tank.

I've already gotten strong push back on comments about nitrifiers in the main forum from advanced reefers, so if I am able to convince folks to not stress over the nitrogen cycle, I expect it will be a slow and only partly successful endeavor.

This idea of cycling in a different way is an evolving concept, hence this thread. N and P could come from dosing or foods, but the goal is to just always keep consumption similar to or ahead of production of ammonia.

I frankly don't think it will be hard at all, because those bacteria that I am not stressing about will happen and will (perhaps unfortunately) add in their own consumption fairly quickly, like it or not.

As to the uglies, this concept is not designed to particularly improve that aspect of early tanks, and the only concern is if it makes it worse, but at the moment I'm not seeing that as all that likely and/or is something that can have solutions.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

My first question is: Is ammonia a problem in the first place?
The inference here is that you need MORE! If it's not a problem in the first place what does having more solve?

The underlying concept is that ammonia is a preferable N source for corals.

The hypothesis is: Having nitrifiers take away the preferable choice and leave them with nitrate, which they have to spend extra energy to use, is not preferable.

Support for this idea comes from folks dosing ammonia and seeing potential tank improvements, despite having adequate nitrate (or dosed nitrate).

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

The second question is: Are we talking about the shorter nitrogen cycle, 1-3 weeks or the longer cycle, 3-6 months? The longer cycle being where you add sps and they typically brown out, stn, and grow slowly during that period.

While I cannot make any specific claims, I do not understand why an SPS coral cannot be put into a new tank set up this way. It may not work out, and I'm also not sure why they would have a problem in other methods, if all basic needs are met. it certainly might be the case that unstable bacteria populations and lacking sufficient friendly types (unrelated to nitrification) may play a role, and if so, this method might be similarly slow to other startup methods in preparing the tank for SPS corals.

Why do you think these problems happen with normal cycling? Understanding that might help all sorts of new tank setup methods.

Again, the goal is to defocus folks from making their tank a nitrifying powerhouse with added nitrifiers, media designed to boost the nitrogen cycle, dosing ammonia on day 1, worrying about ammonia and nitrite, etc.

 

[BeanAnimal]

Randy, it feels like we are unboxing the "old way" and putting some context to it.

I am not arguing against adding piles of ocean cured "live rock" as a "shortcut" and means to bypass some early stages, but I have always felt that the "old way" work just fine and in fact the "slow" and "ugly" are part of the learning process. By the time you get a tank full of fish and coral you have some experience under your belt AND have a front row seat to the progression through each of these "stages" that make a healthy reef.

As for the "uglies" - As I and somebody else mentioned above, dry rock goes through the progression no matter what. Old tank, new tank or tossed in the ocean. Where people get into trouble is trying to use chemicals or other means to fight it. The life on the rock simply must mature and the diatoms and green brown algae are part of that progression.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Great title for your article! “Ammonia is Our Friend”. It sounds a bit edgy and controversial.

Exactly the intent. A typical moderate to advanced reefer is unlikely to read an article titled Ammonia and The Reef Aquarium, assuming it is just all the same stuff on cycling, toxicity, measurement, etc.

 

[BeanAnimal]

While I cannot make any specific claims, I do not understand why an SPS coral cannot be put into a new tank set up this way.

It is done in frag grow out systems every day.

Maybe in a new full reef with piles of dry rock and dead sand going through early stages of life there could be lack of resources or proper biome or swinging ions/elemnts or something? Hard to say.

 

[SDchris]

The underlying concept is that ammonia is a preferable N source for corals.

Yeah, no arguements with that.
The MORE, was in reference to adding anything other then the coral you want to keep.
Algae, soft coral, sand rock......It is all a competitor for ammonia, and it's competing against the the coral I want to target the ammonia.
Iv'e never had an issue with ammonia, even with very bare tanks. So for me it's not a problem. So IMO, less of the algae, sand, rock, what ever else.......means more availability for the coral I want.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Interesting. I think about it like this. If we put a fish in a new fish tank with fresh saltwater in let’s say a 5 gallon aquarium. My question to you is now do I need to remove ammonia? What if I put 10 fish in that aquarium now, will I need to remove the ammonia? 20 fish?

Now let’s say I do need to remove ammonia. I can throw in some algae and some corals right? I think that’s where you are going with this. This is the hard part in my mind, how do you know you have enough ammonia consumers to deal with your ammonia producers. Bacteria helps to take that guess work out. Otherwise we will need to calculate our coral and algae mass and all kinds of other stuff to make sure we have enough right?

Basically it’s all based upon what’s in the aquarium. If you put 20 fish in a brand new 5 gallon aquarium then I don’t think ammonia will be very friendly to you right?

You need some way to remove ammonia so the concentration does not rise to toxic levels. How fast that happens depends on tank size and number of fish, and the toxic levels are higher than many reefers assume, but it is still a severe problem if fish are put into an empty tank. Of course 20 fish in new 5 gallon tank is not going to work out, and that is not the intent.

If that is what folks want they will need other methods.

I guess in reality, I'm not trying to get people to cycle differently than they do not, I'm trying to get folks to understand that

1. Bacterial nitrifiers are not the only way one might start a tank
2. Ammonia is not as toxic a many think, and is not best minimized
3. Nitrifiers may be detrimental in a fully established reef tank
4. Doing things to promote nitrifiers in an established reef tank may do more harm than good

If I can get some reasonable number of folks to agree with these, especially 2-4 since I think they are the most important, then I will be satisfied with the effort.

The cycling concept is just a way to help drive home these issues, not that it's going to be a revolution in tank setup.

 

[mythesis]

Novice here, so maybe I shouldn't weigh in, but have you seen the BRS "ugly stage" series. Synopsis of their findings from Reef Palooza here:


They're talking more about the Biome and less about Ammonia, but seems like your suggestion goes hand in hand with their methodology of finding a good way to jump start the ecosystem from scratch for maximum success.

I don't know that they ever released the final summary of the 2nd round of experiments, the first series stops after the first round. Here's the whole playlist though:

 

[ReeferZ1227]

Yes, adding anything alive will bring bacteria of all sorts, and I'm not trying to stop it. Just trying to defocus folks from obsessing about bacteria and nitrification during tank setup. Bacteria obviously play many different and important roles for corals and reef tanks overall. The goal is not a bacteria free tank.

I've already gotten strong push back on comments about nitrifiers in the main forum from advanced reefers, so if I am able to convince folks to not stress over the nitrogen cycle, I expect it will be a slow and only partly successful endeavor.

This idea of cycling in a different way is an evolving concept, hence this thread. N and P could come from dosing or foods, but the goal is to just always keep consumption similar to or ahead of production of ammonia.

I frankly don't think it will be hard at all, because those bacteria that I am not stressing about will happen and will (perhaps unfortunately) add in their own consumption fairly quickly, like it or not.

As to the uglies, this concept is not designed to particularly improve that aspect of early tanks, and the only concern is if it makes it worse, but at the moment I'm not seeing that as all that likely and/or is something that can have solutions.

What ive found in essentially culuring bacteria and feeding my tank with it is that my SPS do significantly better. Significant. Ive found excess nitrates and phosphates provide more vibrant colorful SPS, and when they dip, i get pale unhealthy coral. Stability doesnt even matter when feeding this bacteria.

What ive also found, is that the different bacteria does not matter much either. Terrestial or marine (microbacter7 vs biodigest).

A couple years ago i would chase around nitrate and phosphate numbers. Results were weak. If i added anpo4 heavy food source, my po4 would spike. Now, to culture the bacteria i use a teaspoon of reef roids and dose the product over 5 days. A tenth of that would cause a measurable spike in the past.

Im interested in your results, but i think were in the early stages of mainstreaming both ammonia and bacteria for the ultimate combination of a healthy reef tank. I personally think youll see coral become very unhealthy, very fast in this experiment, or, better results focusing equally on bacteria.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Novice here, so maybe I shouldn't weigh in, but have you seen the BRS "ugly stage" series. Synopsis of their findings from Reef Palooza here:


They're talking more about the Biome and less about Ammonia, but seems like your suggestion goes hand in hand with their methodology of finding a good way to jump start the ecosystem from scratch for maximum success.

I don't know that they ever released the final summary of the 2nd round of experiments, the first series stops after the first round. Here's the whole playlist though:

I don't watch videos in general (too slow of a way to get needed information for me; a transcript of it would always be my preference, if not an actual article), but yes, I'm familiar with their uglies experiments. Some folks here did some detailed analysis that gives additional interpretation of the evolution.

"Biodiversity is dead, long live biodiversity" 10 month microbiome data from BRStv.

I've meant to start this discussion thread for a while... so here we go. Reef hobbyists have a lot of ideas about biodiversity and what it means in a reef system. A lot of these ideas (mine included) are reasoning from personal experience of myself and others, and how we think it ought to work...

www.reef2reef.com

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Im interested in your results, but i think were in the early stages of mainstreaming both ammonia and bacteria for the ultimate combination of a healthy reef tank.

Thanks, and I certainly don't disagree on the bacteria part. We have an extraordinarily poor understanding of exactly what bacteria may do what in reef tanks that is good, bad, or indifferent, and I also see little reason to assume its the same bacteria in different reef tanks.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Iv'e never had an issue with ammonia, even with very bare tanks. So for me it's not a problem. So IMO, less of the algae, sand, rock, what ever else.......means more availability for the coral I want.

I'd be happy getting new reefers to understand that.

Cycling aside, if we can get reefers to not assume that products such as that below are necessarily desirable, it will be helpful, IMO.:

"Ceramic media is primarily used in a saltwater aquarium to provide extra surface area for beneficial nitrifying bacteria to colonize and grow. "

Biological Filter Media - Improve Nitrification, Prevent Nuisance Algae, and Stop Pests!

Find out how you can use bio media to improve nitrification and stop the spread of pests into new aquariums!

www.bulkreefsupply.com

 

[BeanAnimal]

Maybe in the simplest form, pouring in bacteria is simply putting easily digestible microscopic food into solution and making it available, almost irrelevant to the actual strain of bacteria.

 

[HomebroodExotics]

You need some way to remove ammonia so the concentration does not rise to toxic levels. How fast that happens depends on tank size and number of fish, and the toxic levels are higher than many reefers assume, but it is still a severe problem if fish are put into an empty tank. Of course 20 fish in new 5 gallon tank is not going to work out, and that is not the intent.

If that is what folks want they will need other methods.

I guess in reality, I'm not trying to get people to cycle differently than they do not, I'm trying to get folks to understand that

1. Bacterial nitrifiers are not the only way one might start a tank
2. Ammonia is not as toxic a many think, and is not best minimized
3. Nitrifiers may be detrimental in a fully established reef tank
4. Doing things to promote nitrifiers in an established reef tank may do more harm than good

If I can get some reasonable number of folks to agree with these, especially 2-4 since I think they are the most important, then I will be satisfied with the effort.

The cycling concept is just a way to help drive home these issues, not that it's going to be a revolution in tank setup.

I feel like a lot is lost in translation from the intent. It’s all about what you intend to do in the aquarium. If I plan to keep 20 fish in a 5 gallon aquarium then I will need to do things a certain way. If I plan to keep 1 fish in a 40 gallon aquarium and fill it with coral then that process is different. If I want an aquarium with only coral and no fish then that process is different from a system with more fish than a coral load. Know what I mean? I agree with every thing you say about what ammonia is and does in our aquariums but to paint ammonia as a one way good guy in our aquariums is just as bad as saying bad bacteria imo. Ammonia is another parameter that just needs to be controlled and it seems like we are figuring out that there’s more than one way to skin that cat now but we still have to skin it. (Poor kitty).

 

[ReeferZ1227]

Maybe in the simplest form, pouring in bacteria is simply putting easily digestible microscopic food into solution and making it available, almost irrelevant to the actual strain of bacteria.

Summary of the long winded point i was conveying above.

 

[danimal1211]

As far as possible ideas for the article. For me it would be interesting to see the time frames in which corals can consume NH3 compared to nitrifiers if that is even testable.

 

[ReeferZ1227]

Whats interesting is that ive tried carbon dosing over a few short periods, a few times, and almost always noticed undesirable effects shortly after, you would think this would provide that bacteria food source, no?

Dosing a concentration of bacteria and feeding heavy has produced the opposite. Observable, material positive results. Something to consider in the po4/no3 measurement not telling the whole story.

 

[SDchris]

Maybe in a new full reef with piles of dry rock and dead sand going through early stages of life there could be lack of resources or proper biome or swinging ions/elemnts or something? Hard to say.

IME, Usually the aquaculture stuff is OK, but still takes up to 5 months till you can keep good colour, growth and avoid STN in freshly collected acro from the out reefs of the GBR.