Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi there,

I'm doing a little research on aquaponics, and I'm looking for a list that describes the tolerance ranges for the various plants, bacteria and fish commonly used in aquaponics.

Any such thing exist?

Kind regards,

Karl

Welcome to the forum Sefira

I don't know of any comprehensive list with that information. The bacteria will vary depending on the growing conditions. Either you'll get a different kind of bacteria growing or one that is already there will adapt.

Information on the plants can be found in gardening sites and information on the fish is available through aquaculture and fish keeping forums. You'll find some of that here as well.

If there is anything specific you'd like to know or can't find someone can probably help you if you post the question.

Cheers

Hey thanks!

I thought as much I've been going through various sites to compile a list; I guess I'll just have to continue on that road.

Can you expand a little on the bacteria and growing conditions?

Not much but basically bacteria reproduce quickly enough that if there is a subset of a population that grows better under certain conditions it is quickly selected for and becomes the dominant part of that population. This is usually about some environmental condition like temperature, oxygen, nutrient levels...

The food web is complicated with thousands of different organisms present whose role we don't understand and in many if not most cases we can't even isolate them to better study them. Basically we are trying to establish a group of bacteria that oxidize nitrogen compounds the way we want so that fish waste becomes less toxic to fish and can provide material for the growth of plants.

Of these Autotrophic nitrifiers (these are the ones we're after for processing fish waste)there are three that I've seen mentioned in relation to Aquaponics
Nitrosomonas - Oxidizes ammonia to nitrite
Nitrobacter - Oxidizes nitrite to nitrate
Nitrospira - Oxidizes nitrite to nitrate (wiki only lists this one as marine but I'm not sure if that's actually the case so we'll have to see)

The bacteria that we want to process ammonia and nitrite require oxygen and are favored by conditions where organic carbon is not as plentiful. Higher organic carbon conditions would favor Heterotrophic bacteria (a different group) that grow much faster than the nitrifiers and would quickly outcompete and overgrow them. Some of the heterotrophs can reproduce in around 20 minutes under ideal conditions.

All of these organisms are found pretty much everywhere in nature so it's not necessary to inoculate a system although it may accelerate to process of getting enough organisms present to adequately process the fish waste.

Hope that's what you were looking for.

information is here in this thread...viewtopic.php?f=11&t=131

sadly the poster did no cite the original source - like many on the web.
I did find this site a while ago and that seems to be pretty much the text http://www.bioconlabs.com/nitribactfacts.html
howveer in the modern age of internet plagerism anything is possible.


also look under "Nitrifying bacteria" on wikepedia. And google brings up some additional bits.



some of the information is already compiled in the FAO Small-scale aquaponics document.
http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4021e/index.html