Ahh, but there's the rub, you can't remove it all , no hope, no matter how big a skimmer. Because unless I am very mistaken, fish actively excrete urea and other nonskimmable chemical wastes directly - it's not just the fish poop that's the issue, it's the masses of fish pee as well, released as part of the process of maintaining osmotic balance. So no matter how much you skim, you always get ammonia.
Absolutly! you are dead on correct. BUT think about it, when the fish pee's what happens? do you think the pee floats around until it reaches the sandbed/bucket/rock ? bacteria binds it almost immediatly, along with anything else that is floating in the water (ammonia ions, nitrite ions, dom, particulate matter and so on). So yes a skimmer, no matter how effective will not get it all. But if you allow the bacteria to bind all the different type of dissolved materials (which they will) and then do your best to remove them when the associate with larger particulate matter either through siphon, skimming or what ever other kind of removal method you may have you can stay ahead of the game. The you just use the Rock or sand if that is your choice to polish the water.
Assuming you have good surface flow, and are plumbed into a live system to provide bacterial cultures why wouldn't you think the foot square bucket of sand I describe work? DSB in a bucket? My remote dsb seems to do ok...
I dont assume that it doesnt work. I just think a remote sand bed and or sand in a bucket is very ineffective. Its not even in the location where the problems occur, so at best it only see's a small portion of the things that need to be bound up. no?
Sadly, I find that increasingly hard to live with, as I think it fails 'Occams razor' - it is far easier to think about surface biofilms of anaerobic bacteria covered with a film of aerobic bacteria doing all the work, and live rock facilitates this by having a super complex outer surface , plus live cultures of the various bacteria that are doing this work. The model with bacteria inside the rock is really hard to live with - the permeability of limestones is really variable, and often not that good because of choking of porespace connections by organic material, or the products of.
Yea its bunk for sure. let carry on you make some great points.
I am familiar with sawing up pieces of rock, and seeing different colours , presumed to be limits of bacterial cultures, aerobic, anaerobic zones, and I tinhk these show how far into the rock aerobic water can enter thro' long , surface connected pores, but I am not sure what is going on down in these, and in the rock mass surrounding them. I am not even sure if these aren't simply showing different oxidative states of the clay minerals derived from diagentiised organics that were preserved , trapped during rock formation.
more great points.
However what that means is that while LR is good, sand is easier, better for providing area for bacterial cultures.
ok lets talk for a bit. As you probibly know bacteria are not just free swimming critters that happen to live in areas of water (aerobic/anaerobic) that happen to condusive to them. They create their own enviroments that enhance their ability to bring in chemicals, remove compounds, control atmospherics (bad word but you get the idea) control migration and so on. We call those enviroments biofilms. These biofilm enviroments are not completely controlled by how deep in the rock or sand or bioballs or whatever other surface we use. You can have anaerobic bacteria enviroments on the surface as you can have aerobic enviroments deeper with in the beds. The reason this occurs is that the bacteria will create its own little world as long as it has access to what it needs at some point with in its biofilm. From their it will migrate the products it needs though out the biofilm as well as export.
So if we have to look at the differing forms of bacteria (aerobic and anaerobic) as microscopic critters living with in a mass of biofilm. Now we can inject substraights into the equation. When its a sand bed the biofim enviroments encompass the sand that is with in its biomass. So its not really that sand has more surface area thus it can hold more bacteria, because the bacteria live shoulder to shoulder with in the biofilm and have transmission tubes with in the biomass that migrates in the product they require and the exports their byproducts. Same thing applies to LR it just that the chamber that hold the biofims can be bigger.
The problem is that bacterial degredation is very slow and requires mass ammounts bacteria types to do the job, we as aquarium keepers cant supply that. So we have to help this system as much as we can, thus the use of skimmers, ozone, syphoning and all the other little tricks we have learned about over the years. Also another one is that all things aerobic will eventually turn anaerobic through the build up of end product.
Well I am pretty rusty on talking bacteria so I hoipe I havent just made things more clouded.
Mike
