Are nitrates in your aquarium good or bad? How to find the ideal level?
- May 12, 2023
- Anshika Mishra
- 283 0 0
If you look online for information about nitrate in a fish tank, you get all these warning articles saying nitrate is extremely dangerous, and you need to lower it right away. But if it is dangerous, what amount exactly is considered dangerous, and why do so many fertilizer companies contain nitrate and increase it when you dose it?
Are nitrates safe for fish, shrimp, and snails?
So let's talk about one of the most confusing topics - Nitrates.
What is Nitrate?
When you have fish poop and another organic wringing down in your aquarium water, they end up producing ammonia which can be really toxic to fish, even in small amounts. Luckily nature has things like beneficial bacteria that consume ammonia. But one of the bu products it ends up making at the very end is nitrate, which is considered slightly less toxic.
Unfortunately, there is not a lot of research on the exact lethal toxicity levels of nitrate for every single aquarium animal you can keep. But, one research paper took Guppy fires, and they were able to raise the nitrate levels to 800 PPM nitrates before it became lethal to them.
However, it is recommended to keep Nitrate below 80-100 ppm.
Some people see this upper limit and try to decrease nitrates as low as possible for the health of the fish. The thing is, all our wet pets don't really care about how much nitrate there is. But if you are keeping aquarium plants, they will become very unhappy if you lower your nitrate to zero ppm.
They need nitrate as part of their essential building block. That's why it's recommended to do an all-in-one fertilizer so you can reach 20-50 ppm nitrate for your plants.
When can you skip nitrate?
What if you have a lot of fish and they are making a lot of waste that you have at least 20 to 50 ppm of nitrate in the water? Does it mean you can skip on the fertilizers?
Besides light and water, plants need an exact mix of nutrients in order to have the building blocks. For example, potassium is one of the macronutrients that plants need. And in nature, it usually comes from rocks and minerals that happen over many years.
Too much nitrate
If you have a heavily stocked tank planted, do not stop feeding fertilizers. Follow these steps nitrate instead:
Let's say you measured your nitrate above 50 ppm. You can do a 50% water change or 50% water change every four weeks if needed in order to get down that nitrate level.
Then you can dose one pump of fertilizer for every 10 gallons of water (or as mentioned on the bottle). Wait a few hours, and then go ahead and measure the nitrate again.
The goal is to reach 50 ppm nitrate. So, if it is still too low, continue step two, dosing fertilizer until you get to that level. Next, wait for four days and test the water again.
If the nitrate is already skyrocketing. Go ahead and do another 50% water change and then really consider what you want to do with the aquarium to decrease the rate at which nitrate is being produced. Maybe, you want to remove some of the fish while also adding fast-growing plants (Water Sprite, Pogostemon Octopus) to consume the nitrates.
Too little nitrate
You are gonna wanna start with the same dosing level of one pump of fertilize, and if it's a low-light tank, you can do it once per week. For a medium-light tank, do it twice a week.
It's a starting point because if you find that even when you are following that schedule, you are still seeing leaves turning yellow or melting away, you may need to customize your fertilization schedule.
Record the days when you are fertilizing the tank and then how much fertilizer you used, and soon you'll develop your own customer fertilization schedule, and you'll know how much to dose without measuring all the time.
In conclusion
Be aware that an aquarium is a living ecosystem, and every change in the tank will affect the amount of nitrate consumption and production in the aquarium.
So don't be alarmed if you see traces of nitrate in your aquarium. Your fish aren't going to die, and if you have a planted aquarium, do use some kind of fertilizer to reach the right nitrate levels.
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