Does live rock remove nitrates?

[kwirky]

sorry for the long read!

I read a non-reef oriented scientific paper once on denitrification and how they perform it in water treatment plants. It's very difficult because there are about 100 strains of bacteria that nitrify and denitrify. Some bacteria convert nitrates back to nitrites, some to nitrogen. The study found that finding the "right" bacteria was difficult and they managed to cultivate the "right" bacteria through collecting soil samples from around the world. (On a side note, that article was talking mainly about an interesting study of using organic cotton as a carbon source for denitrifying bacteria instead of traditional sulphur; they were early yet surprisingly positive results)

Now to our aquariums. Natural "filtration" methods are extremely complex. There was an advanced aquarist article on natural deep sand beds where they tested them with livestock and without. The tests with livestock were VERY unpredictable. I think that can correlate to everyone's experiences with denitrification in their tanks. Some people say it happens, some it doesn't, probably because of the great variance in our liverock and the animals (including microscopic) we have in our systems.

Now going to bacterial products like reef-fresh and zeovit:

Originally Posted by Delphinus

I'll say one thing about carbon dosing though, 3 weeks of "Polyp Laps Reef-resh" has done what a year of running sulfur could not, and for the first time in well over a year I have sub-10 nitrate readings in my ritteri tank. Wish I knew what the difference was with this tank and its resistance/resilience to denitrification... it's really weird.

I've noticed some interesting results very quickly with zeovit too. 2 days ago my tank was at 5ppm nitrate (salifert kit). I did a 10% water change that day. Tested today (2 days later) and it's at 2.5ppm. I know those are VERY short term results but it makes me VERY excited about the potential of the system.

I think that these bacterial products are doing a good job at taking the organic compounds (phosphate, ammonia, nitrate, nitrite, nitrate, etc etc) and converting them into less/non toxic chemicals that can be removed by the protein skimmer. And then there's zeovit where the mixture of zeolytes is doing something confusing in the mix too. Zeolytes are mostly carbon based which could possibly explain the efficiency of zeovit's bacteria. Zeolytes are being studied right now along with graphite for carbon-based nano-technology.

The results of bacteria products I think are more interesting to me than natrual nitrification/denitrification because of the results I've seen with my own eyes in tanks running a biological supplementation product. I think the real mystery of these bacterial products is that they're proprietary products that we can't really replicate on our own. These companies have already performed a lot of research and figured things out that work. It makes me wonder if any hobbyists will eventually figure out what's "in" zeovit and reef-fresh and the rest.