Odd question: ammonia & macro/grass

[sfsuphysics]

So my refugium is cycling on my system with a bunch of sand and whatever dry rock I could find lying around while I spend the better part of a week (or more) sanding the bajebuz out of the DT, the idea is to hopefully minimize cycle time when everything becomes inline...

Regardless my question is will ammonia spikes affect macro algae or marine plants? Never has it really occurred to me what ammonia affects would do to plants.

I mean the ammonia levels probably won't be as dramatic as throwing live rock that's been sitting on a hot airport tarmac all day while matter decays on it before finally getting to you (yeah I have experience with that), as everything was dry and there's a minimal amount of dead stuff. Either way just curious if I could toss in some macro algae now or not.

 

[Michael Hoaster]

Plants and algae love ammonia, as long as it's not too much.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

I'm not sure of the toxic levels, but some will take up ammonia preferentially to nitrate.

I discuss it here:

Ammonia and the Reef Aquarium
http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2007-02/rhf/index.php

from it:

Sinks for Ammonia in Reef Aquaria: Algae
Many organisms take up ammonia directly for use in making the proteins and other biomolecules they need to build tissues. Algae, both micro and macro, for example, readily use ammonia from the water. In cases where they are exposed to both nitrate and ammonia as nitrogen sources, many preferentially take up ammonia.6 When using nitrate, many of the pertinent biochemical pathways require the organism to reduce nitrate to ammonia before using it, so taking up ammonia makes sense.6 It has not been established in a reef aquarium setting, however, what portion of the macroalgae's nitrogen uptake is ammonia and what fraction is nitrate.

The amount of nitrogen taken up by a large macroalgal filter is substantial. A free PDF (portable document format) article in the journal Marine Biology13 has some useful information with respect to the potential export abilities of algae. It gives the phosphorus and nitrogen content for nine different species of macroalgae, including many that reefkeepers maintain. For example, Caulerpa racemosa collected off Hawaii contains about 0.08% by dry weight phosphorus and 5.6% nitrogen. Harvesting a pound (454 g; dry weight) of this macroalgae from a reef aquarium would be the equivalent of removing 25.4 grams of nitrogen, which, if it were all present in 100 gallons of water as ammonia, would be equivalent to a concentration of 67 ppm total NH4-N. Even if it took three months to grow to that mass, it would effectively be taking out the equivalent of 0.75 ppm total NH4-N per day.