High Nitrates

[Caesar]

I don't know what happen but my nitrates were zero a week ago and now there about 20ppm. I have about 30lbs of LR and 20lbs of LS and my tank is about 4 or 5 months old. I just added a watchman gobie 2 days ago but I didn't think adding one fish would case a spike. Is there something else that may caused my nitrates to rise? I'm going to do a 20% water change and test again tomorrow.

[OscarBeast]

Well my first guess would be that you added a fish and have been feeding him. Fish produce more ammonia than you think in a small tank. Give it a couple of days and everything may ballance out.

[sjpresley]

That would be my guess as well. Remember your tank is a system. As such most systems remain relatively balanced with respect to how quickly it handles input. If you adjust the input by adding a fish, you can expect things to take a few days to a week to adjust as bacteria cycling nitrogenous waste in your system take advantage of the new resources and reproduce. Once accustomed to the increased resource availability you will have higher populations of each group of bacteria, including those that live in anaerobic conditions in your LS and LR that help control nitrates.

 

I would monitor the situation over a few days to get a nitrate profile before I took any action (unless the nitrate increasing trend doesn't abate and things are getting out of hand).

[Dave ESPI]

gobies stirr up sand. perhaps he could have released some nutrients that were in the sand bed, and your test kit picked up on them.

[Caesar]

How much nitrates can a fish handle. I'm worried because this is the most expensive fish i've ever bought. also I had a 3 stripe damsel but I took it back to my lfs because I didn't want it to fight with my new fish. So I guess the watchman has a bigger bio load than the damsel.

[OscarBeast]

Nitrates aren't too hard on fish unless they get really high. Other reef life is fairly sensitive to nitrate though.

 

What is quite toxic is ammonia and nitrite. As long as they are 0, I wouldn't worry too much unless the nitrate really gets up there.

[Caesar]

I think I found the problem; I have about a gallon of bio media in my DIY wet/dry. I've done a search on high nitrates and found several threads that say bio balls = nitrate factory. I am going to start removing my bio media slowly. I am also considering adding a refugium with a 5” DSB and a few pounds of LR.