Ammonia

[Dave Spencer]

By the way, the phrase was definately not a phrase I made up. It was something that seemed to be around in a lot of threads I was looking at back when the search engine worked.

~~waterdrop~~

Hi WD,

I have read it on this forum before, but I was just wondering who coined the phrase.

It would seem to be a bit of a misnomer for the majority of the planted tank community who do not test and, therefore, never notice any nitrite spike.

Using ammonia to cycle a tank that will contain no plants and will be heavily stocked with fish makes sense, as it will do in the case of the OP too. The three or four plants will have a negligible effect on the cycle in a tank using stock lighting. Having said that, I bet the initial die off of some of the leaves will give an elevated ammonia reading, but I couldn`t say whether that would be detectable.

Cycling and testing a "planted tank" is a tad pointless when nitrates and phosphates are being added, and when people such as myself use rapid plant growth and zeolite/zeosand to keep ammonia to an absolute minimum for algae beating purposes.

Dave.

 

[OldMan47]

I have no idea where the expression came from but it is usually used to describe what happens when a well planted tank has fish added and no ammonia or nitrites are ever measured. The plants use the ammonia the fish generate as food and you don't see anything downstream coming from that waste. It just gets used by the plants. It is one of the ideas behind doing a Walstad-type tank. Once everything has been set up, on day one you plant a ton of fast growing plants and put your fish into the tank. The plant growth uses any nitrogen that becomes available and the fish never know the difference.