ldsdbomber
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- Jan 15, 2010
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I am a beginner, so bear with me. I see the sponge ring inside some kind of housing with water inflow and outflow obviously directing the water and associated chemicals through the sponge where presumably a lot of the beneficial bacteria will live. I also know that the fishless cycling routine is designed to feed latent colonies of bacteria in the water possibly, and they grow on this media and the substrate etc. How much benefit is there in simply putting extra media in the tank to provide more surfaces for bacterial growth, is it impeded greatly by not being in direct currents? If you squeeze an extra sponge into the casing, does that potentially allow twice as much bacteria to get a hold, or are you risking reduced flowrate through the whole sponge area. Also, since bacteria are microscopic I assume a single sponge can hold a lot of bacteria, but since clumsy cleaning or rinsing of sponge and substrate can affect a less than mature cycle, is there any benefit to simply providing more material for it to take hold. The Biube I have comes with a very coarse, almost rocky ceramic media and the current of water passing over and through that must be quite small, though clearly important. What if I just covered that with another substrate like the Eheim substrate pro that is also like porous media? Is there a way to quantify an amount of media in terms of its bacterial loading capacity or is it just a stupid quantity since the amount is essentially infinite when discussing microbial life on a macro object?