Bacteria are qualified “ubiquitous”, it means that they leave everywhere, on all surfaces. Some of them can live in high temperature, others in low temperature, oxygen / no oxygen, high pH / low pH. The main bacteria we are growing in aquaponics have well known preferences and this is what we will see in this article/video dedicated to aquaponics bacteria.
Which aquaponics bacteria are we talking about?
In aquaponics we aim to grow bacteria responsible for the “biological filtration” (transforming ammonia into nitrite and nitrate). Some of those (Nitrosomonas and Nitrobacter) have been well studied and we know their requirements.
Oxygen:
We know that they require oxygen (an aerobic environment). That is the reason why we have a bell siphon in our flood and drain growbed allowing an efficient aeration of the media.
Temperature:
Bacteria are “cold blood” creatures and therefore their metabolism activity increase with temperature. It explains why our systems are much more efficient in summer than winter.
pH
Our bacteria accept a large range of pH but the optimum is between 7.5 and 8.
So what pH should we aim for in aquaponics?
In aquaponics we are keeping a diversity of leaving creatures. They all have different pH requirement. It is therefore impossible to offer the optimal pH to all leaving creatures in our ecosystem. Instead we will select the best compromise for all those species. The pH scale goes from 0 to 14. 7 is the exact middle. The biological activity in our aquaponics system constantly decrease the pH. When we readjust the pH we generally aim for a little bit more than 7 in anticipation of the future decrease.
See more information about aquaponics pH here
You will probably be interested to discover Jonathan’s six steps to build and manage an Aquaponics system. Click here to access for free! Thanks and good reading 🙂
