foods causing ammonia?

[messesb52]

Hi everyone so for those of you who haven't seen my recent threads/posts, i recently acquired a marbled motoro stingray a little over a week ago. I tested my water a few days ago and was suprised to find some ammonia. This was a puzzler for me because i have kept multiple rays in this same exact setup multiple times before and haven't had hardly any problems with ammonia. Over the past few days, i rinsed my filter cartriges from my eheim 2215 canister filter in tank water, done multiple water changes, purchased an additional aquaclear filter for my tank and added some cycle to my tank to add some extra bacteria in hopes of removing the ammonia. The ammonia level seems to be going down and luckily i have observed no strange behavior in my ray, peacock bass, or eartheater through this short ammonia spike. Now that the ammonia has went down i am trying to figure out what caused this spike...
I know that many people might say that it was probably from the tank not being able to keep up with the large amount of waste that the stingray started producing in my tank, but i was thinking this... with my past stingrays, i fed them almost strictly nightcrawlers, and with this new stingray he strangely wouldnt accept nightcrawlers and would only accept foods such as silversides and sometimes frozen market shrimp. I was wondering if these meaty foods that i was feeding him could have possibly "broke up" a little when added to the tank, causing small pieces to scatter throughout the tank, therefore causing ammonia, while when feeding nightcrawlers, there is very little extra food being released into the tank when added (if you know what i mean). Like the meaty foods break up much easier in the water compared to nightcrawlers which really dont break up at all. My ray has recently started accepting crawlers a little bit so hopefully this change in food will help keep the ammonia level down. Just wanted to get everyones opinions on this thought that i was having.

 

[johno27]

From the sounds of things the ray might not be eating as much as it should be which could be a side effect of the ammonia.

I would think the combination of the bio load of the ray and the uneaten food could have caused your spike

Just my personal opinion but I find cannister filters to be less than reliable with rays.

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[messesb52]

thanks for the reply, the weird thing is that the ray definetely has been eating a lot of silversides and shrimp and from what i could tell there has been little left over food in the tank, puzzling me why the spike occured. Maybe you are right,maybe theres more left over food in the tank than i thought. And also since im getting a 180 gallon in a few weeks, what filters do you prefer over canisters? i was planning on a wet/dry with maybe filter socks, do you think this is a good choice of filtration?

 

[johno27]

A wet dry is a great choice. If you have the room you may want to consider a bio-reactor or a bead filter like an UltimaII. You could still run the filter socks If you did either of those you would just prefilter the water before sending it through the bead filter or reactor. The advantage to that setup over a wet/dry is the ease of cleaning the bio media with backwashing and there will be no place for crud to build up. I am in the process of adding some UltimaII to my wet/dry system with the plan being to remove the media from my wet/dry eventually and utilize that space in a different way. I considered going with a reactor but I am very cramped for space and I got a great deal on the UltimaII since I work at a LFS

Also If I where you I would skip the 180 and go with something larger 24" wide will last a little while but something wider would be ideal. My tank is 36" wide and I wish I had room for a 48" wide tank

 

[hereticlosmorte]

i would imagine that due to the foods breaking up/scattering around the tank, they could get stuck and not eaten, helping the ammonia to spike.
that being said, did you have anything in this setup already, or was it without any fish for a period of time/broken down and just re-setup? if it had fish in it, and a stable bacteria colony, it might tip the scales into ammonia until your BB responded to the added bioload.
if it was fishless and you weren't adding anything to keep the bacteria alive, it could have destabilized/killed off your colony.
if you just set it back up for the new ray from scratch, then you probably don't have a stable colony of BB yet.

i've used cycle in the past, and found that it didn't seem to do anything positive to my tank, best is water changes to lower the ammonia levels and let the bacteria do their job and catch up. feed the ray a little less until you see the levels start to lower.