Hi all,
You will just need to do the odd water change every few weeks to freshen up the water!
The filter will do its job as normal, even with a lower bio load.
What Hoggie says.
Do I need to 'feed' filter with ammonia?
No, the <"
whole cycling premise"> isn't really that <"
relevant to planted tanks">.
The <"
traditional linear view of cycling"> was a best guess based on the <"
scientific knowlege at the time">, but <"
science has moved"> on and we now know that nitrification is carried out by a network of organisms, if you like it is a London (or Toronto) tube map, not a motorway (freeway) from A to C (or really from NH3 > NO2- > NO3-).
............Before the development of RNA libraries we were reliant on culturing bacteria (from sewage treatment etc) to find out what organisms were involved in nitrification, which led to many of the assumptions about aquarium cycling that we now know to be incorrect. It isn't surprising, if you look at raw sewage it is a very different medium, from even very polluted, aquarium water. There are a number of papers specifically on the nitrifying organisms in aquarium filters which suggest that their assemblage shows a fluid response to varying ammonia loadings, with a stable core of archaea and an ever changing cast of nitrifying bacteria. This is described in <"
Freshwater Recirculating Aquaculture System Operations Drive Biofilter Bacterial Community Shifts around a Stable Nitrifying Consortium of Ammonia-Oxidizing Archaea and Comammox Nitrospira">...........
I was pretty sure that the high ammonia, high carbonate hardness <"
view of the nitrogen cycle wasn't right">, even before the discovery of all these <"
novel ammonia oxidising organisms"> (via DNA techniques), because it didn't make any ecological sense.
To use a <"
slightly strange analogy">*, if we only knew about "Polar Bear", we would say that all bears are white, live in the artic and eat an exclusively carnivorous diet, however if we then found "Giant Panda", followed by a "Sun Bear", we could either review our knowledge of bears, or we could carry on insisting that both Pandas and Sun Bears are actually polar, white and carnivorous.
The "
all white and carnivorous" argument is really the traditional view of cycling, fine in the past but untenable once we found the other bears, if that makes sense?
* I really like
@ElleDee 's <"
jam one">
cheers Darrel
