Does live rock remove nitrates?

[Aquattro]

Originally Posted by sphelps

If you're looking for some good information on the subject try researching waste water treatment, denitrification is a necessary part of this. There's not a whole lot out there for info regarding this in the aquarium.

Hmm, I'm actually a factory trained water quality technician, however wastewater treatment and natural denitrification in live rock are two different environments. The books I mentioned above though, are wastewater management related. As soon as I dig them out, I'll start reading. Limnology will also give us some clues about natural anaerobic/anoxic zones, so those books need to come out too. Maybe I shoulda just bought some rock and shut up

[Aquattro]

not done reading this yet, but so far looks like an interesting article from Dr. Ron

http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2004-0...ture/index.php

[Aquattro]

Originally Posted by reef_raf

not done reading this yet, but so far looks like an interesting article from Dr. Ron

http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2004-0...ture/index.php

So this seems to answer some of the questions, while posing some new ones. Coraline growth and population of creatures within the rock can influence filtration capacity. Hmm. Tony, review the parts about "good rock" vs. "bad rock"....

[mark]

Seems to make sense if the rock became encrusted with corals or coralline would have an effect.

[Aquattro]

Originally Posted by mark

Seems to make sense if the rock became encrusted with corals or coralline would have an effect.

Yes, and my question about how the water gets through the rock is answered with fauna living inside the rock. Lots of worms, etc, lots of movement with subsequent filtration happening. No worms, no filtration....hmm

[Doug]

I would agree rock does de-nitrify but certainly not the most efficient like a dsb or plenum system. Or my turf scrubber.

I have seen pics of tanks with very old rock and doing fine. I get the same algae growth on newer expensive Fiji, as my 17yr. old Florida type rock.

How the heck does one take the rock from a full blown reef and cook it. I once also said in regards to rock being changed out after some time, that when I start throwing away rock thats $5 to $10 a pound, that the day I take up another hobby.

[Reefer Rob]

I've always thought that algae plays a more important roll in denitrification than it's given credit for. When I switched from PCs to T5s my nitrates went from 20 to 10, and when I took a DSB refugium with too low of a flow off line it went to near 0. I'm thinking the biomass of algae living inside live rock and sand would be equal to or greater that that of bacteria. Perhaps buying or making rock with an open porous structure is more important for the growth of algae rather than bacteria, allowing light to get farther into the rock.


For anyone considering carbon dosing to increase bacteria efficiency, sugar will work as well as any of the commercial probiotic systems, but the down side is it doesn't come with an instruction manual. If you're not willing to spend a couple of weeks researching it before you give it a try, it's far safer to stick with Zeovit, Polyp Lab etc. which has a dosing regimen already established for you.

[kwirky]

sorry for the long read!

I read a non-reef oriented scientific paper once on denitrification and how they perform it in water treatment plants. It's very difficult because there are about 100 strains of bacteria that nitrify and denitrify. Some bacteria convert nitrates back to nitrites, some to nitrogen. The study found that finding the "right" bacteria was difficult and they managed to cultivate the "right" bacteria through collecting soil samples from around the world. (On a side note, that article was talking mainly about an interesting study of using organic cotton as a carbon source for denitrifying bacteria instead of traditional sulphur; they were early yet surprisingly positive results)

Now to our aquariums. Natural "filtration" methods are extremely complex. There was an advanced aquarist article on natural deep sand beds where they tested them with livestock and without. The tests with livestock were VERY unpredictable. I think that can correlate to everyone's experiences with denitrification in their tanks. Some people say it happens, some it doesn't, probably because of the great variance in our liverock and the animals (including microscopic) we have in our systems.

Now going to bacterial products like reef-fresh and zeovit:

Originally Posted by Delphinus

I'll say one thing about carbon dosing though, 3 weeks of "Polyp Laps Reef-resh" has done what a year of running sulfur could not, and for the first time in well over a year I have sub-10 nitrate readings in my ritteri tank. Wish I knew what the difference was with this tank and its resistance/resilience to denitrification... it's really weird.

I've noticed some interesting results very quickly with zeovit too. 2 days ago my tank was at 5ppm nitrate (salifert kit). I did a 10% water change that day. Tested today (2 days later) and it's at 2.5ppm. I know those are VERY short term results but it makes me VERY excited about the potential of the system.

I think that these bacterial products are doing a good job at taking the organic compounds (phosphate, ammonia, nitrate, nitrite, nitrate, etc etc) and converting them into less/non toxic chemicals that can be removed by the protein skimmer. And then there's zeovit where the mixture of zeolytes is doing something confusing in the mix too. Zeolytes are mostly carbon based which could possibly explain the efficiency of zeovit's bacteria. Zeolytes are being studied right now along with graphite for carbon-based nano-technology.

The results of bacteria products I think are more interesting to me than natrual nitrification/denitrification because of the results I've seen with my own eyes in tanks running a biological supplementation product. I think the real mystery of these bacterial products is that they're proprietary products that we can't really replicate on our own. These companies have already performed a lot of research and figured things out that work. It makes me wonder if any hobbyists will eventually figure out what's "in" zeovit and reef-fresh and the rest.

[reptile guy]

I remember hearing someone saying about dosing your tank with sugar but don't know how effective that would actually be or if that would work along the same lines as vodka. Rather use the vodka to get me drunk and not my fishes

[Chin_Lee]

Originally Posted by reptile guy

I remember hearing someone saying about dosing your tank with sugar but don't know how effective that would actually be or if that would work along the same lines as vodka. Rather use the vodka to get me drunk and not my fishes

be very careful with dosing vodka. it can crash your tank very quickly by providing too much nutrient to a certain strain of bacteria which will then start covering your rocks with slimey bacteria.