How The Nitrogen Cycle Works in a Fish Tank

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Anybody that decides to create an aquarium and keep aquatic life has a number of duties of care for their animals and plants. You have to feed them, keep them healthy and keep their environment clean and inhabitable. Keeping the environment clean and inhabitable means keeping the water clear to look at and keeping the chemical balance within the tank to a level that sustains life.

It might surprise you to think that the chemicals in water can make the water harmful to aquatic life. Fish seem to get along fine in rivers and lakes but the critical difference is that a fish tank is a confined volume of water. Whereas a river is a large volume of water that is constantly moving and has an ecosystem that can cope with harmful chemicals, a fish tank has none of these characteristics. Creating these characteristics in your fish tank is your responsibility.

Keeping the chemical balance right in water is known as the nitrogen cycle. In simple terms it is about converting waste products from fish that can be harmful into harmless gases.

Bacteria, notably the Nitrosomonas bacteria convert ammonia into the chemical compound nitrite. Nitrite is not as toxic as ammonia but is still potentially harmful to fish.

Another bacteria, Nitrobacter is responsible for oxidizing nitrite. It adds an oxygen atom to the compound to create nitrate. Nitrate is considerable less harmful to fish than ammonia and nitrites and is the end product of the nitrogen cycle.

For the fish tank owner it is important to create a tank with enough bacteria to handle this process. You can either buy products that contain these bacteria and drop it into the tank or you can allow the bacteria to form and grow naturally. Bacteria will occur naturally as a consequence of the waste products needing to be removed. Thus many people talk of building up an aquarium slowly.
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