Help!! Biological filtration

[Brantley]

I am starting a 120 gallon reef tank. I will be using live sand and live rock. Would the use of BioBalls be beneficial to use in combination with these things or should I leave them out completely?

The more beneficial bacteria the better?

 

[Sk8r]

No. A detriment.
The bacteria live in water, sand, and rock. They include the bioballs in sumps for fish-onlies. FIsh don't mind the high nitrate they produce, but corals do.

 

[homer1475]

Bioballs themselves are fine to use, as is any media which increases the surface area for bacteria to grows. The reason people have gone away from using them is having to clean them on a regular basis.

Cleaning them can be a huge PITA and typically doesn't get done on a regular basis making them detritus traps and nitrate factories as that detritus breaks down.

 

[GoVols]

I'm Running 4 liters of Seachem Matrix in the X large Aquamaxx Bio Pellet reactor. Running at 30gph to grow denitrifying bacteria for nitrates.

Also have 2 more liters in sump placed in basket with high flow.

http://www.seachem.com/matrix.php

 

[Timfish]

Totally unnecessary. And I would not worry about nitrates. I also do not believe bioballs promote bacteria that make nitrates especially having a system (110 gallons) that has been running a wet/dry for a couple decades and has nitrates at ~5 mg/l (Nyos) with about 2g of pellets daily (~12g frozen). To get nitrates you have to have an imbalance between the total nitrogen going into the system and what is being consumed by algae and corals or, sponges and cyano fixing nitrogen and putting it into the food chain. Providing they have enough phosphate (organic or inorganic) your corals as they start growing are going to suck up any form of nitrogen and will especially like the ammonia excreted from by fish from their gills and the urea in their poop. Corals are taking those forms of nitrogen out of the water before your nitryfing bacteria have a chance to use it. Algae is also going to suck up ammonia before your nitryfing bacteria.

I would encourage you to get Forest Rohwer's Coral Reefs in the Microbial Seas. It does an excellent job of introducing current research on how reefs interact with the microbes, algae and fish in a very readable format. They also include an excellent list of research to dig deeper if you want. For more info on the roles of sponges in consuming the DOC produced by corals and algae and converting it into alkalinity (HCO3-) and fixing nitrogen into nitrate rich particles that are then introduced to the reef food chain search Jasper de Goeij's papers on sponges.