The Nitrogen Cycle Explained - Essential Info

[shiftline]

Understanding the nitrogen cycles is essential for every new aquarist! Be sure you fully understand this when setting up a new tank regardless of if it's fresh or salt water

https://youtu.be/GRf5ncU52bk

 

[Timfish]

Not impressed. First complaint is he totally left out the organic nitrogen processes that help feed corals. As far as nitrifying bacteria dealing with the inorganic forms they are competing with corals for it. Corals need nitrogen so badly they are utilizing any form they can get, organic and inorganic, and beside have very complex relationships with a host of microbes to scavenge and recycle nitrogen some corals have simbiotic cyanobacteria to convert free nitrogen into nitrates.

The speaker also perpetuates the myth that reefs need very low phosphate levels by not giving the natural levels found on reefs. The average on reefs is .13 mg/l and upwelling may expose reefs to levels as high as 2.0 mg/l. Beside needing phosphate for their own growth corals need phosphate to utilize nitrogen for their symbiotic algae. This idea of starving algae for phosphate often hurts corals worse and keeps them from competing with algae. A quick perusal of the forums will find many aquarists that have stripped out PO4 but have not fixed their algae problem and their corals have become pale and sickly.

A much better video is Richard Ross' presentation on his reef. (Richard Ross manages the Steinhart's 212,000 gallon Phillipine Reef that Charles Delbeek helped set up.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRIKW-9d2xI

And a good book to review more recent research on corals is Forest Rohwer's "Coral Reefs in the Microbial Seas".

What's fascinating is the recent research showing corals (heterotrophs), not algae (autotrophs), are promoting autotrophic microbial activity:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3719129/
http://www.nature.com/ismej/journal/v7/n5/full/ismej2012161a.html?message=remove
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3719127/

 

[shiftline]

TimFish. I'm sorry you did not enjoy my video. I did include some of those notes in the video description. Thanks for posting the additional great resources


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