Hi all,
Now looking at my notes I clean the sand with the gravel vac every 3 weeks, And soon after I get staghorn on some of the leaves. Is it my cleaning that is doin this?
It may well be, Stags-horn algae is often associated with an ammonia spike <
http://www.theplantedtank.co.uk/algae.htm>. Could you do your water change after you've vacuumed? it might stop it happening.
Very interesting article, and in words that us mere mortals can understand.
Thanks for pointing this one out, I haven't seen this article before, but I believe it is correct.
If you shove the gravel vacuum into the sand or gravel of the aquarium you will be pulling out beneficial organisms, disrupting your anaerobic layer, and worst of all your heavily colonized aerobic top layer will no longer be heavily colonized with aerobic bacteria.
You do need to remember that this advice applies to fine grained substrates like sand, where uneaten food, faeces etc sits on top of the substrate and you have plants and MTS to offer some turn-over of the substrate. If you don't have any MTS or plants, and have a coarse gravel substrate, I think you need to keep stirring and syphoning.
I actually wrote much the same in the "Aeration and dissolved O2 ......." article <
http://plecoplanet.com/?page_id=829>, in the "substrate and structure" section.
Structure and substrate
Might seem as a bit of a strange section in a page on aquarium aeration, but as well as the filter, plants, wood and other surfaces in the aquarium offer a potential home to the community of aerobic bacterial that metabolize ammonia to nitrite and then nitrate. The uppermost surfaces of the substrate are a good location for these bacteria, because the nitrification process uses a lot of oxygen. However only a few centimetres below the substrates’ surface, the diffusion of oxygen can't supply enough oxygen, and as oxygen levels fall anaerobic bacteria become more frequent (in exactly the same way that is shown in the schematic drawing of a cross section of a trickle filter). Many of these bacteria are in fact “facultative anaerobesâ€; when oxygen is in short supply, they are able to switch to a metabolism that doesn't require oxygen, instead, they use nitrate, stripping the oxygen and leaving nitrogen (N2) gas. The nitrifying bacteria provide the nitrate, and their high oxygen demands also tend to exhaust the limited supply of oxygen. These two types of bacteria will occur across a fluctuating boundary lying not far beneath the surface of the substrate. The same processes will also occur in the “rhizosphere†the aerated zone lying around aquatic plants roots. These processes are both a good reason for:
1. Having a substrate, and
2. Leaving it relatively undisturbed.
I think the 2 option in aquaria cleaning are the OCD approach that Jozebs uses so successfully <
http://www.plecoplanet.com/forum/showthread.php?t=9538> or an approach where you have a sponge pre-filter that you keep pretty clean, (and have lots of biological filtration capacity), remove any obvious dead leaves, dead fish etc and do frequent water changes, but other than that try keep your hands out of the water and avoid doing any "gardening" or very regular filter maintenance. I use the second method, and I know Bob (Macvsog) does as well. I think the advantage of it is that you have stability and any changes are likely to be fairly slow giving you a chance to respond.
I think often problem come where people use a little bit of each method, I know from UKAPS <
http://www.ukaps.org/forum/> that a lot of members who use EI fertilization, CO2 and high light are absolutely fanatical about OCD tank maintenance, mainly because any slight deviation from it and things are likely to go wrong very quickly.
cheers Darrel
