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The nitrate levels in my saltwater aquarium are very high Does anyone have good advice on how to low2007-11-24 23:41:06Answers:

How high is your nitrates? How many parts per million (ppm)?Short term solution is to change water regularly but remember to maintain your water salinity. The salt gives relief from high nitrates and nitrites. For long term solution, you gotta have to have some aquatic plants which are salt resistant. Not many plants can resist 0.3% salinity. Some plants like duckweed or arrowhead comes to mind.

Having a waterfall may help in dispersing some nitrates in gaseous form. Maybe you can modify the return spout to drop the water high back to the aquarium but mind the splash. This increase in turbulence can help a bit in pumping a bit of O2 in the water. If your filtration system is fairly new, the increase in nitrates is quite understandable as your system needs time to mature. If you want to speed up maturing your filtration system, I would suggest you take some filtration medium from an established system and put it in your filter to speed up the propagation of the biological bacteria. But careful because you might introduce unwanted pathogens as well.

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the nitrate level is a symptom so you need to address the cause. Adding a frop of xyz will be like putting a bandaid on a compund fracture.

1) reduce the # of fish

2) take a good look at your bio-filter.

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Nitrates are the 3rd and final result of your Nitrogen cycle. They can only be consumed by plant live, or more frequent water changes.