greetings one and all here is some info i found out about aquaponics
Backyard Aquaponics Mag
Aquaponics can be as simple or as complex as you’d like to make it, the simple system pictured above has a large fish tank in the left of the picture, and a growbed filled with gravel raised above the level of the fish tank in the centre of the picture.
Water is pumped up from the fish tank into the gravel filled growbed. The water trickles down through the gravel, past the roots of the plants before draining back into the fish tank. The plants extract the water and nutrients they need to grow, cleaning the water for the fish.
There are bacteria that live on the surface of the gravel. This bacteria converts ammonia wastes from the fish into nitrates that can be used by the plants. This ammonia waste being converted into nitrates is often termed “the nitrogen cycle”.
Fish produce ammonia waste...
Natures got it all sorted! Enter Nitrosomonas sp. This good littlebacterium eats ammonia and converts it to nitrite.
Now, nitrite is much less poisonous to the fish than ammonia, but it’s by no means a good thing. It stops the fish from taking up oxygen. Natures got it under control again, with Nitrobacter sp. This goodbacterium eats nitrite and converts it to nitrate.
Luckily nitrate happens to be the favourite food of plants. Also the fish will tolerate a much higher level of nitrate than they will ammonia or nitrite. What you’ve just read is pretty much the nitrogen cycle. When an aquaponics system has sufficient numbers of these bacteria to completely process the ammonia and nitrites it is said to have “cycled”.
Your goal should be to establish the nitrogen cycle quickly and with minimal stress on any aquatic life you may already have.
Without their respective “foods” these bacteria will not exist in useful numbers. This is why you will see an ammonia “spike” when setting up a new tank. The bacteria will increase their numbers (reproduce) in response to an increasing ammonia load, so it makes sense that we would see a “spike” before they respond. Shortly after you have ammonia the bacteria will start reproducing and working away for you.
The same goes for Nitrobacter sp., they’ll only want to start reproducing and working once Nitrosomonas sp. is comfortable and producing lots of nitrite. Now for a few facts on them: They must colonize a surface (gravel, sand, synthetic biomedia, etc.) for
optimum growth. They need oxygen in the water to live and work. Nitrifying bacteria have long reproduction times. Under optimal conditions, Nitrosomonas sp. may double every 7 hours and Nitrobacter sp. every 13 hours. More realistically, they will double every 15 - 20 hours. To put that into perspective. In the time that it takes a single Nitrosomonas sp. cell to double in population, a single E. coli bacterium would have produced a population exceeding 35 trillion cells. As a general rule a brand new system will require about 4 weeks to cycle at around 20°C. It will take longer in colder water. Nitrifying bacteria cannot survivein dry conditions or at sustained temperatures higher than 49° C . There are several species of Nitrosomonas sp. and Nitrobacter sp. bacteria and many strains among those species. Most of this information can be applied to species of Nitrosomonas sp. and
Nitrobacter sp. in general, however, each strain may have specific tolerances to environmental factors and nutrient preferences not shared by other very closely related strains. Temperature and pH seem to be common.
Temperature
The temperature for optimum growth of nitrifying bacteria is between 25° – 30° C
(77° – 86° F).
Nitrobacter sp. is less tolerant of low temperatures than Nitrosomonas sp. In cold water systems, care must
be taken to monitor the
accumulation of nitrites
pH
The optimum pH range for Nitrosomonas sp. is 7.8 - 8.0. The optimum pH range for Nitrobacter sp. is 7.3 - 7.5 At pH below 7.0, Nitrosomonas sp. growth will slow and increases in ammonia may become evident. Nitrosomonas sp. growth is inhibited at pH 6.5. All nitrification is inhibited if the pH drops to 6.0 or less. Now, while one point you’ve just read indicates that Nitrosomonas sp. won’t process ammonia at pH 6.0 or below, this was determined in a sterile lab culture. Similar research has shown that species of Nitrosomonas sp. in a natural environment such as soil will still process ammonia even at pH 4.0! This goes some way to explain why some of us have systems that are YEARS old with a pH of 6.0, no ammonia and happy fish. Once a system has a compliment of micro flora and fauna at work there seems to be an inherent synergy that allows wider environmental ranges to be accommodated.
So, the fish give off ammonia which can be nasty at high levels, the bacteria converts the ammonia into nitrites and then nitrates, then the plants consume the nitrates from the water. The water is then returned to the fish tank cleaned of excess nutrients and freshly oxygenated.
Dr. Nick Savidov is a Canadian researcher that has been researching inorganic hydroponics for 20 years. After hearing about aquaponics he decided to put it to the test against normal inorganic hydroponics. In the first 6 months of production the inorganic hydroponic growth was found to exceed aquaponic growth, this is because an aquaponic system takes time to mature and build up the complex ecosystem of bacteria and micro flora and fauna in the system. Further trials found that after 12 months the aquaponic system growth rates began
to outstrip the growth of the inorganic hydroponics by almost double with many plant species. After 2 years the aquaponic system was found to have matured even more, and had reached it’s optimum production level, with some plant species outgrowing the inorganic plants, at over double the growth rate. Unsure as to why this was happening, and because he had been a skeptic of aquaponics with a firm grounding of 20 years in inorganic hydroponics, he decided to really put things to the test. He examined the aquaponic water for all of the macro and micro nutrients, and then reproduced an inorganic hydroponic solution that had the exact same levels of macro and micro nutrients as the aquaponics. Yet still aquaponic plant growth far exceeded inorganic hydroponic growth.
Aquaponics can be scaled from a tiny desktop system in an aquarium to a medium sized backyard system, right up to large commercial systems that produce tons of fish and vegetables every month.
http://davidcecere.pipidae.org/biocycle.htm
this is where i learned about the nitrogen cycle for my fish tanks, i have 2x bio-filters and a uv light filter, it is 600L mind and both filters are for about 400L tanks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaponics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Multi-trophic_Aquaculture
heavy with info read. background info etc
Las
