Quote:
Originally Posted by Twinfallz
I run a scrubber that grows a species of ulva, so i was interested in the observation that ammonium uptake occured during darkness.
Found this -
Ulva efficiently removed up to 85% of the ammonium from fish pond wastewater in darkness or light independently of temperature fluctuations. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02180927
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"A preference for amrnonium over nitrate has also been observed in other subinerged macro-phytes, such as Ceratophyllum demersum (Toetz,1971) and Myriophyllum spicatum (Nichols &Keeney, 1976b). In C demersum, nitrate uptake has been found to correlate with light intensity,practically ceasing in the dark, while ammonium uptake was continuous and decreased only slight-ly at night (Toetz, 1971)" |
According to this article Ulva and possibly other macros uptake ammonium and not nitrate at night as nitrate uptake is dependent on light intensity.
This has me wondering if we should dose something like ammonium chloride at night to help speed up growth and in theory the algae would grow 24/7 and not just with lights on.
I also wonder how uptake of ammonium and the subsequent growth at night affects the ph of the system. I realize that ph is driven by photosynthesis and respiration of the macro, I know this is more complicated than this I'm just making a point, but considering we know nothing about the mechanisms at play who knows.
Jason
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