Why do so many people base bio load off of species of fish? Bio load is created by the waste of the fish from the food aquarists feed them. If fish eat 2-3% of their body weight on average you can size the media to the amount of waste the fish is expected to produce, removing the nitrites and ammonia then doing your water changes to remove nitrates. I get people overfeed and don't remove uneaten food but I see all the time topics about bio load that people just relate to the fish itself. It's the type of food we feed....over feeding....etc.
Bio load
- Thread starter tcav88
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Hello; Let me use an example from my experience. I kept a common pleco for a time. The pleco made long strings of poo that were unsightly. Knowing the pleco ate plant based wafers and grazed on the live hornwort in the tank I introduced red Ramshorn snails. The snails fed on the pleco poo which still had a considerable amount of food value. Reduced the unsightly pleco poo and generated a lot of snails and less unsightly snail poo.
Point being that the pleco has a less efficient digestive system being largely a vegetarian feeder. Similar to horses and cattle which may only digest 50% of the food value from the grass they eat. In fact dried cow manure can be burned as a fuel.
My take is that different species of fish can have digestive systems with varying levels of efficiency. That should mean different species when fed the same food can make a different bioload per pound.
It seems that goldfish may be such a fish that are considered to be a heavy bioload compared to other similar sized fish. This may have something to do with them being usually kept a cooler temperatures.
Hello; Let me add a bit before I take a nap and forget. I see the point that in most ways food in equals total nitrates out. That we could simply measure food quantity to get an idea of the biological impact.
I think we tend to think about bio-load from the aspect of the fish because of the variables. My guess is those doing commercial fish farming will have some numbers. I will make up some numbers for the purpose of illustrating a point and not in any way from true knowledge.
Say you desire to harvest the meat at some optimal point so as to get the maximum meat from the least amount of food. For one type of fish you get ten (10) pounds of meat for every (100) one hundred pounds of feed. For another type of fish you get twenty (20) of meat for the same one hundred (100) pounds of feed. Same feed and other conditions but a different outcome because of the differences of the species. A distinction without much of a difference in some ways.
Back when I taught units about such things as the food pyramid and food chains I used these figures. For getting beef to market at the most efficient rate it was around 8 to 9 pounds of feed per one pound of meat. For pork it was around 4 or 5 pounds of feed to yield one pound of meat. For chicken it was around 2 1/2 pounds of feed to yield a pound of meat. Another way to think of this is that if you have limited amounts of feed you can feed more people meat if you raise chickens.
I do not think there was, or at least I did not know of, much commercial fish farming back then. This was before we had so thoroughly decimated the ocean fisheries as we now have.
I think we tend to think about bio-load from the aspect of the fish because of the variables. My guess is those doing commercial fish farming will have some numbers. I will make up some numbers for the purpose of illustrating a point and not in any way from true knowledge.
Say you desire to harvest the meat at some optimal point so as to get the maximum meat from the least amount of food. For one type of fish you get ten (10) pounds of meat for every (100) one hundred pounds of feed. For another type of fish you get twenty (20) of meat for the same one hundred (100) pounds of feed. Same feed and other conditions but a different outcome because of the differences of the species. A distinction without much of a difference in some ways.
Back when I taught units about such things as the food pyramid and food chains I used these figures. For getting beef to market at the most efficient rate it was around 8 to 9 pounds of feed per one pound of meat. For pork it was around 4 or 5 pounds of feed to yield one pound of meat. For chicken it was around 2 1/2 pounds of feed to yield a pound of meat. Another way to think of this is that if you have limited amounts of feed you can feed more people meat if you raise chickens.
I do not think there was, or at least I did not know of, much commercial fish farming back then. This was before we had so thoroughly decimated the ocean fisheries as we now have.