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Re: GH and green water
Roger S. Miller said...
>On Wed, 25 Aug 1999, Dave Whittaker wrote:
>
>> I was surprised that no one commented on my previous post concerning
>> the disappearance of green water subsequent to the addition of dolomite
>> to three tanks.
>
>Well, I meant to but I got distracted.
>
>Phosphate combines with calcium to produce some pretty insoluble
>compounds. I thought that maybe by increasing the hardness you
>precipitated or sequestered the phosphate so the algae could no longer
>grow. What I don't really understand is why that mechanism or any similar
>nutrient-related mechanism would cause such a drastic disappearance of the
>algae. It seems to me like disappearance due to starvation should be
>fairly slow - especially since the nutrients contained in the first
>cells that die would be at least partly recycled and be available to
>surviving cells.
This was fairly quick -maybe three days.
>Perhaps there are two or more mechanisms at work. For instance, some
>single-cell animals like paramecia are important algae grazers and act as
>natural control on algae blooms. Perhaps your green water tanks contained
>a fairly delicate balance between the green water and the grazers. If
>something (like calcium making phosphate unavailable) slowed the algae
>growth then the grazers could quickly wipe out the standing crop of algae
>fairly quickly. The grazing population would have died afterwords, as
>well.
One would expect an algae rebound at this point, but the water in the
15 gallon remains clear so far. I probably should remove the plantlife
and observe the effect if any.
--
Dave Whittaker
Gloucester, Ontario
Canada
ac554 at FreeNet_Carleton.ca