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Re: Green water fallacies?

>From: gtong at sirius_com (G.Tong)
>
>I've got another question for you all. Someone on the Goldfish List has
>stated firmly that green water is caused by incomplete biological
>filtration, that if our filters were working, there would never be green
>water. His reasoning is that green water algae can only live when there is
>ammonia around whereas "hairy algae" (his term not mine) can thrive on
>nitrates and phosphates. He claims this is why green water is *never* found
>in planted tanks.
>
>Neither his conclusion nor his assumptions along the way sound right to me.
>Advice? TIA.

I would agree if he said that green water would cause incomplete nitrification
by bacteria, primarily because suspended algae are very effective at
out-competing the bacteria for nitrogen.  

Perhaps he came up with this conclusion by either adding a UV sterilizer to the
tank or diatom filtering and then finding out that his bio-filter wasn't at a
high enough capacity to handle the ammonia production.

However, from what I've seen, green water usually reduces NHx and NOx levels in
the tank to basically zero in a very effective manner.  The biggest problem
I've heard of then is when someone kills the suspended algae quickly enough to
add the nitrogen back to the water while overloading the bacterial
nitrification system.

David W. Webb
Enterprise Computing Provisioning
Texas Instruments Inc. Dallas, TX USA
(214) 575-3443 (voice)  MSGID:       DAWB
(214) 575-4853 (fax)    Internet:    dwebb at ti_com
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