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Aquaium Filtration


Fishes, invertebrates, algae, live rock and all other living creatures in a reef aquarium all impart changes to your system's water quality. Whether you're conscious of it, or try to improve on it, or not, there are meny tiny reactions that take place to convert, "cycle", otherwise offset the accumulation and toxicity of these waste and by products.

The most common element you’ll see in any fish tank is nitrogen and it's cycling. What makes nitrogen such a useful tool for keeping your eye on your system's water quality? Imagine being able to make an easy measure/test for what's going on in your system metabolically

Basically, all living things are made up of molecular building blocks called Amino Acids. These are structures of carbon chains (some with sulfur), oxygen, hydrogen that are linked to one another by amino bonds to form proteins. Amino bond sounds a lot like ammonia, because it is. The nitrogen cycle is the sum total of processes that convert atmospheric nitrogen (N2) into compounds useful to animals and plants (proteins made up of Amino Acids), that eventually make their way back (cycle) to their original start (atmospheric nitrogen).

For marine aquarium keeping the picture is much simpler actually. Protein Nitrogen enters into the system mainly as livestock and food. Eaten and not most of this material is broken down/converted to (unionized) ammonia (NH3) and (ionized) ammonium (NH4) a less toxic form. Nitrification occurs principally through bacteria (e.g. Nitrosomonas) metabolizing ammonia to nitrites (NO2-) and other groups (e.g. Nitrobacter) in turn converting nitrites to nitrates (NO3-).

All closed systems need a biological filter as large and efficient as possible/practical to mineralize wastes into non-toxic nutrients, while providing for a minimal changing of water composition, in particular pH.

Original marine systems...