Biofilters are the difference between life and death for your fish ponds. You need clean healthy water.

Summary from a chapter of "Your Pond: Crystal Clear Water Guaranteed" - The first pollutant to occur in a pond containing fish is a chemical called ammonia. - This section delves a little more deeply into ammonia, what it is in a pond environment and under what circumstances it is really dangerous. - This sounds crazy - a fish eats food to grow but in doing so sows the seeds for its own death by poisoning. - This is achieved in a lake for example by restricting food supplies, limiting fish population and ensuring there is a biological balance that prevents ammonia building up. - To understand what can happen and to therefore prevent dire consequences a basic understanding of ammonia chemistry in water helps. - Ammonium is continuously transforming itself into ammonia and hydrogen ions in the water and vice versa. - Changing the situation by changing pH (means the acidity or how alkaline water is) or temperature for example will disturb the old equilibrium and create a new one. - This is another reason for installing an UV light even in the best koi ponds with excellent biofiltration. - Gerry Preston who writes superb articles on koi keeping in the UK magazine "Nishikigoi International" calculated that between 3 and 4% of the dry food fed to koi becomes ammonia which is secreted by the koi into the pond water. - The solution to this potentially disastrous situation of ammonia poisoning is the installation of a well designed biofilter big enough to cope with the existing fish density and also the future stock density that will arise from the fish growing. - This series of reactions is referred to as the nitrification cycle.

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copyright: 2002, this website and many others to do with water gardening and use of water in the home was created by Tony Roocroft who lives in Johannesburg South Africa