Thanks TRT!

There was this thing about nitrates that was bugging me, so I went to post a thread. But trying to explain the question I had took me on a tangent in my head, and once I figured out what I was actually curious about, I realized I already knew the answer. It just wasn't ogamized right. I'm gonna post the first draft anyway, as a stream of consciousness thank you to the forum. You guys all have apparently planted enough weird little seeds of info in my head that if I shake it around the right way, I can figure a lot of this out on my own :beer:



Presenting, the mental process of a noob...



idk chemistry, so I'm trying to catch up. I'm on my third run through of reefkeeping made easy, and I've been poking around in the light reading. I can't believe how much work geoff et al put into these education threads, it's kind of amazing. I have this basic distrust of authority, so I keep trying to go "off the reservation" so to speak by trying to google this stuff on my own, or read other forums, but there isn't much out there and it's all so well sourced in here. I fear it's making me a lazy reefer... The thing that's tricky is each reader comes to the party with a very unique background, and often curious about one thing or the other, so the threads are a lot at once. You start skimming for what your looking for and catch yourself thinking about Peter Quinn, right?



But everyone seems to be having nitrate issues lately, and I'm scared I will too. So I'm impatient. If the bacteria are all stacked up in a perfect circle of life why do we see so many nitrate threads and not like, ammonia ones?