Post by Xander on Dec 17, 2016 15:07:47 GMT -5
A curious thing, today.
I missed my weekly water changes last weekend, and so today I tested for nitrates just to have a better idea of how much water I ought to change out.
To my utter confusion, for all three tanks, I tested absolutely zero across the board for nitrates!!
I thought that maybe I'd used one of the wrong test kit bottles and just wasn't getting the chemical reaction I was waiting for, and so I tested again - all zeros a second time in a row.
So, concerned for the state of my cycle, I then tested for both ammonia and nitrites. I got an incredibly slight reading of ammonia (way less than 0.25 PPM) on my 40 breeder only, which is not entirely a surprise due to the addition of 5 new tiger barbs... though I figured the cycle would have been all caught up by now after two weeks. But other than that, all other tests read a very definitive zero.
My nitrate test solutions don't expire until the year 2020, and I got results no problem when I tested 2 weeks ago. The bottles are always all shaken very thoroughly before use.
Now, the only things new that happened, in all three of my tanks, were:
1) I treated PraziPro in all of them, which indicates it will not affect the biological filtration on the label, and;
2) I started to dose Seachem Flourish.
My theory right now is that, after adding the flourish, perhaps my plants are jumping into high gear and starting to absorb chemicals of the nitrogen cycle (be it the ammonia which never gets a chance to convert, or be it the nitrates themselves, or perhaps even both). I don't know if that's scientifically sound, but it's the best hypothesis I have right now. The thing is, only one of the tanks could be considered moderately planted (java fern, copius java moss, hygrophyla polysperma, crypts) while the other two would be considered very sparsely planted (a few crypts and some water sprite in one, christmas moss, water sprite, and fanwort in the other; the plecos ate all my swords). Could so few plants in the 33g l and 40g b still eat up all those nitrates? The bioload in either is not that light!
While my water changes two weeks ago were large ones to lower the accumulated nitrates I had, they weren't large enough water changes to completely eliminate them (between 50-60% WC's), so by all accounts, I SHOULD have had positive results.
Thoughts?
I missed my weekly water changes last weekend, and so today I tested for nitrates just to have a better idea of how much water I ought to change out.
To my utter confusion, for all three tanks, I tested absolutely zero across the board for nitrates!!
I thought that maybe I'd used one of the wrong test kit bottles and just wasn't getting the chemical reaction I was waiting for, and so I tested again - all zeros a second time in a row.
So, concerned for the state of my cycle, I then tested for both ammonia and nitrites. I got an incredibly slight reading of ammonia (way less than 0.25 PPM) on my 40 breeder only, which is not entirely a surprise due to the addition of 5 new tiger barbs... though I figured the cycle would have been all caught up by now after two weeks. But other than that, all other tests read a very definitive zero.
My nitrate test solutions don't expire until the year 2020, and I got results no problem when I tested 2 weeks ago. The bottles are always all shaken very thoroughly before use.
Now, the only things new that happened, in all three of my tanks, were:
1) I treated PraziPro in all of them, which indicates it will not affect the biological filtration on the label, and;
2) I started to dose Seachem Flourish.
My theory right now is that, after adding the flourish, perhaps my plants are jumping into high gear and starting to absorb chemicals of the nitrogen cycle (be it the ammonia which never gets a chance to convert, or be it the nitrates themselves, or perhaps even both). I don't know if that's scientifically sound, but it's the best hypothesis I have right now. The thing is, only one of the tanks could be considered moderately planted (java fern, copius java moss, hygrophyla polysperma, crypts) while the other two would be considered very sparsely planted (a few crypts and some water sprite in one, christmas moss, water sprite, and fanwort in the other; the plecos ate all my swords). Could so few plants in the 33g l and 40g b still eat up all those nitrates? The bioload in either is not that light!
While my water changes two weeks ago were large ones to lower the accumulated nitrates I had, they weren't large enough water changes to completely eliminate them (between 50-60% WC's), so by all accounts, I SHOULD have had positive results.
Thoughts?
