control algae by the right N:P ratio

ecotanker said:

Another weapon to battle algae, very interesting! Several Dutch aquarists was able to get rid of nuisance alage by adjusting the redfield ratio to be around 16.

http://buddendo.home.xs4all.nl/aquarium/redfield_eng.htm

Click to expand...

My "ratio" varies by 3:1 for N and have ran it out to 30:1 N

So this sort of falsifies the entire hypothesis.
and that is.what you are suppose to do with hypothesis, try and test to prove them wrong INDEPENDENT, of other factors............

There is also a glaring oversight and I sent an email to Charles discretely some years ago about this: the ratio listed is atomic (Redfield's ratio is atomic ratio of Atoms, not mass eg, mg/L), but the ratio discussed for aquariums is mass.

If you adjust for mass, then this becomes about 10:1.
This was pointed out many times, but has never been changed.

Here's an example of a tank of mine and there's a long journal or two:







30:1:




So this falsifies the algae issue with ratios pretty effectively.
You can add a lot of KNO3 suddenly and induce no algae.

Same with PO4, folks have done this more times than they can shake a stick at here and on many forums as dosing mistakes without any ill effect. For it to accepted as a hypothesis, we should have gotten algae blooms as suggested by this ratio, but we have not.

So why did they find better results?
Likely because they relieved a strong limitation of 1 of the nutrients.

So plants grew better and algae was an indirect consequence of poor plant growth, not ratios of nutrients. Plants define the system, not nutrients.
There is very strong evidence for this vs what they proposed here.