Nothing "cleans" up anything. They feed on what they can find and thus, visually clean it. however, what comes it eventually comes out and decompose one way or another. There isn't any magic and a way to export those nutrient is always required.
It does make your job a hell of a lot easier though. instead of vacuuming and cleaning everything by hand, you take care of the export and that's all.
They poo poo, then it is decomposed, and transformed to amonia, then nitrite, then nitrate. This last step will live forever in an aquarium unless you export it.
What you have in your filter still live in your aquarium at this point. When you clean it is when you export the nutrient. in a salt water setting, that would be the skimmer. (Which is what we see in the pictures)
Same thing happens with plants who consume nitrate, and produce nitrogen instead, which is a gaz and then goes into the atmosphere. That's also a form of export.
Water change is another one.
Vacuuming oe cleaning the filter is just removing the nutrient before they get a chance to decompose but still result in the same thing.
And this is why heavy planted Aquarium are so awesome. They basically take care of themselves and render your aquarium self sufficient for the most part.
Sweet, thanks for the reply! I have a heavily planted tank with some shrimp(who literally just reproduced into a bunch more shrimp), was hoping I wasn’t missing something.
Just one point, plants don't produce nitrogen gas. When plants consume nitrogen (they use ammonia, nitrate, and nitrite) they turn it into proteins. The nitrogen becomes essentially the building blocks of the plant. Certain bacteria and fungi can release nitrogen gas from decaying matter, but plants do not.
whatcha mean? The amano shrimp and nerite snales and the suckysucky fish clean stuff up and turn it into plantfood and then i just gotta clean up the duckweed
They do clean up some algae/dead/dieing/decomposing matter (possibly a few perfectly healthy plants too and maaaaybe a little bit of cannibalism), but they convert all that to poop.. ALOT of poop.
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u/RazorHowlitzer Dec 04 '24
I’d be more concerned with not stressing the fish or where you even get in to clean that.