Quote:
Originally Posted by bertoni
I certainly agree that carbon dosing sometimes seems to fail. We could test the hypothesis about the direct consumption of ammonia by putting a bit of rock in a container with a skimmer, etc, and feeding it some nitrate. There's going to be little ammonia created if there's no food added. If the nitrate disappears, that could be due to denitrification or more direct consumption of nitrate, and less likely to be ammonia uptake. I'd need to think about this for a bit, though.
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Yeah, tough to unravel. I think the question is whether carbon dosing gooses nitrate consumption. Toonen’s experiment on different substrates might provide help with an experimental design.
If nitrate consumption is not goosed, then carbon dosing might be changing how ammonia is consumed and the system just slowly consumes nitrate.