Hi Hennie, i see in one of the threads it is suggested that fish dying could be because of Nitrate poisoning. First off i must say i do not question your knowledge at all, in fact i am wondering if i may have missed something along the way.
If i did, is it any different for marine fish and fresh water fish?
This subject has been debated at length on fresh water sites and in fact the subject became so heated that it was banned on most of them. All i can relate is my personal experience with NO3, i used to breed discus many years ago and in my grow out tanks would sometimes have 100+ discus in a 4ft tank, okay it sounds heavy but they were around the R5 coin size. The thing is they were fed about 7x a day with heavy water changes daily about 80% at a time, the Ph at the end of the day would be below 4 around the 3.8 mark and then with the water change would rise again to about 7 and then slowly work its way down again over 24hrs. I ran these tanks on massive canister filters and had nitrates off the scale of any test kit but never had any problems with these readings causing the fish any kind of stress at all or any gill deformities.
Now although not poisonous it is far from ideal to have nitrates in a system as they do not exist in nature, unfortunately in a breeding set up they are unavoidable.
So i was wondering if there was a difference between the Marines and fresh as i have never had high nitrates with my marine system, if there is could it be PH related as it is with Ammonia?
Thanking you in advance.
If i did, is it any different for marine fish and fresh water fish?
This subject has been debated at length on fresh water sites and in fact the subject became so heated that it was banned on most of them. All i can relate is my personal experience with NO3, i used to breed discus many years ago and in my grow out tanks would sometimes have 100+ discus in a 4ft tank, okay it sounds heavy but they were around the R5 coin size. The thing is they were fed about 7x a day with heavy water changes daily about 80% at a time, the Ph at the end of the day would be below 4 around the 3.8 mark and then with the water change would rise again to about 7 and then slowly work its way down again over 24hrs. I ran these tanks on massive canister filters and had nitrates off the scale of any test kit but never had any problems with these readings causing the fish any kind of stress at all or any gill deformities.
Now although not poisonous it is far from ideal to have nitrates in a system as they do not exist in nature, unfortunately in a breeding set up they are unavoidable.
So i was wondering if there was a difference between the Marines and fresh as i have never had high nitrates with my marine system, if there is could it be PH related as it is with Ammonia?
Thanking you in advance.
I will see if I can still edit the post in question, and correct this mistake.