I thought as it started to decompose it added to ammonia?
how to get my ammonia down
- Thread starter KATALEKEEPER
- Start date
It will. But a dead fish if removed quickly shouldn’t add very much to the ammonia.
It would depend on when it was discovered and how far the decomposition has progressed.
Prime has always worked for me,if i'm out of prime i do a large water change.A fish starts to decompose shortly after it's dead ,certainly started decomposing in 18 hours.Imo extra bio media wouldn't help,the bacteria only grows to the size of it's food source and will die off without one.If the surface area in your tank is inadequete for more BB to grow in order to handle your bioload ,more biomedia could help but if isn't the media is going to be useless anyway.It isn't going to multiply to handle an ammonia spike in such a short time.
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I must be the densest participant in this thread, haha... I am not getting this one either.
At what temp? At 90F it'd start to smell rotten a bit, at 60F it'd still be (perfectly) edible by a scavenger type tank mate. At 75F, it'd be borderline edible and although I have never experimented with this, that is measuring ammonia as a function of time a dead fish lays in my tank, I'd naively imagine that the ammonia would not read elevated above zero ppm by an API liquid test.
The decomposition begins even in an ill or dying fish. Body parts can rot on live fish. Dead fish starts decomposing immediately but this is all a question of the extent.
You could be right but my understanding of the biofiltration differs a bit, if I understand your words right, which is not a given... Your picture denies such thing as overfilteration or such thing as any margin of safety. Your picture says - the moment ammonia increases, it is harmful to fish because there isn't enough BB's anymore to convert it because BB's take time to multiply.
First, it depends what the bottleneck is, that is the limiting factor. I agree, one is food (ammonia) availability. Second is surface area available to BB's to colonize. Third is dissolved oxygen concentration. These are all roughly equally important and this crude picture is but a first approximation.
Some things to consider:
Ammonia is never at 0.00 ppm in a fish tank, it is always present, in a well run tank its concentration is simply less than what's readable by our home test of minimum a zero ppm and hence safe for fish to handle. Crudely, the ammonia has plenty of room to vary e.g. from 1 to 100 ppb, parts per billion (1 ppm = 1000 ppb), and still be read as 0 ppm.
Biofiltration is more complex than we think, and even than what scientists think. Only recently it was discovered that different BB species, different animals, handle "high" ammonia and "low" ammonia loads.
Bacteria are well known for their "hibernation" abilities, that is under unfriendly-for-living or thriving or even hostile, harsh environmental conditions they become dormant and wait for an improvement - more food, more oxygen, higher temp, etc.
BBs compete with many other bacteria for their place under the sun, which is one reason regular cleaning (removal of detritus and the bacteria that feeds on it) helps nitrification.
BB structures are complex. With plenty of food and oxygen but not enough surface, the BB films start thickening it seems and hence the bottom ones must be starved for food and oxygen while the top ones are enjoying the full unrestricted buffet. Given more surface, they can spread and this may result in more efficient nitrification.
my tank is at 80 f. Thank you for the info!
The product of decaying organic matter is ammonia. The dead fish was likely the cause of the ammonia spike. What most test kits read is Total Ammonia. In water this is a combination of ammonia, NH3, and ammonium, NH4. The first is highly toxic, the latter is much less so. How much of any Total Ammonia reading is in each form depends upon the pH and temperature of the water. The higher these are, the more of the total ammonia is in the toxic NH3 form.
Incidentally, there are calculators on the net for calculating how much of Total Ammonia is in each form. If your tank, at 80F, was at pH 8.5, then .25 ppm of total ammonia would not be harmful for fish. It would have been 0.0432 ppm and the red line is at 0.05 ppm for almost any species of fish we keep. At .50 ppm it would be another story. Then NH3 would have been 0.0864 and that is over the red line.
Next, the nitrifying bacteria do not form spores, they divide. What causes them to divide is there being more ammonia or nitrite present than they can use. So they divide. As noted above, different strains of ammonia oxidizers will colonize based on the concentration of ammonia. But there was not enough time or ammonia present for this to happen in your case.
Now for what happened in your case, The fish died, you took a while to find it and this resulted in the ammonia spike. This would have started the bacteria reproducing. But nitrifiers are very slow to reproduce and the dead fish was able to make more ammonia faster than the bacteria could reproduce. Hence the spike.
Then you removed the dead fish, which also removed the source of the excess ammonia. This meant no more ammonia could be produced by the corpse. So you did not need more bacteria, what you required was less ammonia. That could have been accomplished by large water changes. There was no need for excess dosing of Prime or Stability which does not contain any nitrifying bacteria since it is a bottle of spores.
The only Prime you needed was whatever you normally add when you change water.
Lastly, had ammonia been the cause of the death of the fish, nothing quickly removed that level of excess ammonia, the dead fish would have then increased ammonia levels even more. This should have had a clear effect on the remaining fish as well. All of which argues against ammonia being the cause of death.
Edited to add: Prime will cause one to get false ammonia readings, SeaCgem syggests when dealing with ammonia that you test very soon after adding prime to get a more realistic reading. So it is possible if you are adding excess Prime this was responsible for some of the readings you continued to see. This is from the FAQ for Prime on the SeaCem site:
Most hobby ammonia test kits are salicylate based. API is.
Incidentally, there are calculators on the net for calculating how much of Total Ammonia is in each form. If your tank, at 80F, was at pH 8.5, then .25 ppm of total ammonia would not be harmful for fish. It would have been 0.0432 ppm and the red line is at 0.05 ppm for almost any species of fish we keep. At .50 ppm it would be another story. Then NH3 would have been 0.0864 and that is over the red line.
Next, the nitrifying bacteria do not form spores, they divide. What causes them to divide is there being more ammonia or nitrite present than they can use. So they divide. As noted above, different strains of ammonia oxidizers will colonize based on the concentration of ammonia. But there was not enough time or ammonia present for this to happen in your case.
Now for what happened in your case, The fish died, you took a while to find it and this resulted in the ammonia spike. This would have started the bacteria reproducing. But nitrifiers are very slow to reproduce and the dead fish was able to make more ammonia faster than the bacteria could reproduce. Hence the spike.
Then you removed the dead fish, which also removed the source of the excess ammonia. This meant no more ammonia could be produced by the corpse. So you did not need more bacteria, what you required was less ammonia. That could have been accomplished by large water changes. There was no need for excess dosing of Prime or Stability which does not contain any nitrifying bacteria since it is a bottle of spores.
The only Prime you needed was whatever you normally add when you change water.
Lastly, had ammonia been the cause of the death of the fish, nothing quickly removed that level of excess ammonia, the dead fish would have then increased ammonia levels even more. This should have had a clear effect on the remaining fish as well. All of which argues against ammonia being the cause of death.
Edited to add: Prime will cause one to get false ammonia readings, SeaCgem syggests when dealing with ammonia that you test very soon after adding prime to get a more realistic reading. So it is possible if you are adding excess Prime this was responsible for some of the readings you continued to see. This is from the FAQ for Prime on the SeaCem site:
(Underlining added by me)
Most hobby ammonia test kits are salicylate based. API is.
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ammonia was definitely not the cause of death. It was 100% Malawi bloat. Thank you so much for the info!
You stated
While technically this is true a decomposing fish could creat ammonia to the point that the Biological didn’t have time to reproduce in sufficient numbers to neutralize it.
I simply meant that the ammonia being present could have been the cause of the death rather than the decomposing fish causing the ammonia.
Maybe scientists haven't even scratched the surface on BB,who knows.There might even be hundreds of variants of BB which we don't even know of yet ,each with different tasks contributing towards a balanced eco-system.On the other hand i'm just a guy with a few tanks ,my tanks nor my fish are as big as yours.However i do agree that you can never have enough mechanical filtration.Occasionally i store some extra bio media in my overhead sumps ,incase I do have to pick up a new fish or setup a new tank,does it do any good?That i don't know.It was nice talking to you, been watching your videos for a while now
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