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Message: [QUOTE="shakaho, post: 161540, member: 2789"] I appreciate your point about plants not competing with algae for nitrates, but I have to call you on[B] this. [/B] The [B]only[/B] food produced by photosynthesis is sugar. Like us, plants can use sugar to make starch (in our case, glycogen) and fats, but they can't make protein without nitrogen. Plants are much better than us at making proteins. We need to eat protein to get amino acids. We can't eat nitrate and use that to make amino acids the way plants do. A plant can survive as well on photosynthesis alone as you would on a diet of pure sugar -- slow, but inevitable death. Almost all land plants use nitrate as a nitrogen source. Some can use other sources with the help of symbiotic microbes ( we all know about legumes and their pet nitrogen-fixing bacteria). On the other hand, algae and many aquatic plants (duckweed is a good example) prefer ammonia as their nitrogen source, even though most can also use nitrate. This means that algae get nitrogen from ammonia before it can be oxidized to nitrate and then compete with plants for the stuff they missed after it has been converted to nitrate. The plants would like that nitrogen, but the algae beat them to it. This is why green water has great nitrogen parameters (typically 0,0,0). It's also why killing your green water algae can result in a "cycle bump." The huge number of algae use up so much ammonia that they starve the nitrifying bacteria, which then fail to grow. The reduced number of bacteria can't process all of the ammonia that becomes available upon the death of the algae, and one suddenly sees ammonia and nitrite in the water. But plants in the filter system, whether growing in a bog filter, in the top of a barrel filter, or in a trickle filter, do clean out nitrate. They also do a lot more that ponders rarely give them credit for. Plants are a vital part of every bio-remediation project. While they can make their own organic compounds from sugar and minerals, they happily slurp up any that are supplied to them and modify or store them. Many take up heavy metals. If you remove dead vegetation, all of this stuff comes out of your system. [/QUOTE]

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