if plants produce oxygen and like co2 why cant u just add more fish?
- Thread starter Zeta054
- Start date
Fish make these exchanges a lot faster than plants do. Also - plants go into "reverse" at night, fish do not.
Fish don't contribute that much co2. Your idea is theoretically correct, but the number of fish you'd have to have packed into the space of aquarium wouldn't work. In a hight light tank, there isn't any number of fish you could put in that would give you enough co2....you would literally run out of space and have your fish packed like sardines and you still wouldn't have enough co2 for a hight light tank let alone room for plants.
This isn't really good logic...it works in this case, but generally, just because masses of people do one thing doesn't mean it is the best way to do it.
<<---being a little snide
Being a little over-technical, maybe, but:
Plants do not "go into reverse" at night; they are respiring (using O2 and releasing CO2) all the time, just like animals. But a healthy plant, when exposed to light, is a net producer of O2 and a net consumer of CO2. When not exposed to light, photosynthesis stops and only respiration is occurring, so they become net producers of CO2 and net consumers of O2.
That may have been what you meant, but I just thought I would clarify.
tanker
Josh Holloway--Be mine!!!
Fish put out more ammonia then CO2. To get the right amount of CO2 from fish, they would die from ammonia.
Of course, plants like nitrogen too! But, as everyone has said, the amount of CO2 put into the water by fish is small compared to the amount that diffuses out of the atmosphere into the water.