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Potasium Gluconate Worsens Cyanobacteria?
The hypothesis: I'm wondering if potassium gluconate might worsen a
cyanobacteria problem. When I add 5 potassium gluconate tablets to the
tank, most of what I'm actually adding (by weight) is glucose, a simple
sugar. This has always kind of bothered me. Somebody in the tank has
to eat up all that sugar, and I'm wondering if maybe it might be the
cyanobacteria. (You could run an experiment where you try to grow
cyanobacteria in tank water and glucose with no light I suppose... I
remember from my days as a microbiology major that lots of bacteria are
very adaptable in this sort of way.) Anyway, I thought I'd just throw
out the idea for consideration.
The anecdote: My job briefly got in the way of my aquarium interests,
and my overstocked, overplanted, undermaintained tank developed pretty
high nitrates (20+ ppm -- high for me). Cyanobacteria started growing
along the glass/gravel line. I started adding potassium gluconate and
the nitrates dropped (I was very pleased about this -- it was right out
of Conlin and Sears), but the cyanos just kept on growing. (They do
seem to behave in a somewhat "infectious" manner, in that once they get
really established, they're much harder to control.) I'm wrestling
things back under control now, but I can't help wondering if that 500
gram dose of sugar every week didn't make things worse. Just a
thought. In any case, I'm not going to finish using that bottle of
potassium gluconate after all. I'm going back to KCl.
-- Sherman Lovell