are bubbles bad?

[jmack]

I have a canister filter on my tank with an outflow that ends in a spray wand..this is putting bubbles in the water..is this good or bad? They are small bubbles everywhere on the glass, etc.

[sunamoon]

i don't have the reasons why, ok? but i have been told that too much oxygen in a salt tank is bad.

waterkeeper where are you?

[jmack]

I could take the wand off and let it flow directly from the hose into the tank..it's just really noisy

[tsquad]

Microbubbles don't harm anything. In excess, they probably could. Getting stuck in coral polyps and stuff. Sounds like you have quite a bit of them. I'd take the wand off the hose and just let it flow directly.

[jmack]

thanks tsquad

[BTTRFLYGRL]

I have 2 spray bars on either side of tank facing each other and I place them just under water level. this stopped the bubbles for me

[jay24k]

Nothing wrong with bubbles. The myth about harming polyps etc is just a myth. You can keep them if you like but most don't like them for aesthetics (sp)

[jmack]

I heard somewhere that they made fish sick..any truth to that or just a rumor?

[Nuhtty]

People dont like microbubbles because in excess they tend to obscure the view and take away from the asthetic appeal of the tank.

If a canister filter is shooting out microbubbles, there may be a few reasons:

1. The lid is not tight enough
2. The rubber "O" ring is not properly sealed (maybe a small amount of vaseline on the ring will help)
3. The canister filter doenst have the appropriate level of media in there

If the spray nozzle is the cause of the bubbles, remove it. If not, see if you canister filter is set up and running properly.

[BTTRFLYGRL]

Too many bubbles can make a fish sick, I guess even kill them. It does have a name, I just cant think of it at the moment. I read about it on WetWebMedia. You can find it on their website by putting the word 'bubbles' in the search

[Alfalfameister]

From my recollection (and my memory isn't very good -- so that's already a disclaimer), bubbles like that aren't bad... but bubbles produced under pressure (i.e., cavitation) injects too much oxygen (super micro bubbles), which isn't very good.

Again, my memory ain't so good, and besides, I tend to avoid bubbles anyway, so no use jogging my memory about that topic too much.

[WaterKeeper]

The bubble bit is a myth probably fostered by people who disliked Lawrence Welk's music. It has been blamed for everything from swim bladder problems to popeye in fish and for the loss of countless inverts for lack of any other reason. Sometimes when people are unsure why they lost something in their tanks they must point the finger at some cause and bubbles are easily visible. See also, Eric Borneman.

[Alfalfameister]

Originally posted by KIMHARDIE
Too many bubbles can make a fish sick, I guess even kill them. It does have a name, I just cant think of it at the moment. I read about it on WetWebMedia. You can find it on their website by putting the word 'bubbles' in the search

Ahhh... did some searching...

Emphysematosis, Gas Bubble Disease

Here's the link:

http://www.wetwebmedia.com/PondSubWe...BblDisease.htm

I fully respect Waterkeeper and Eric Borneman, and indeed heed a lot of their advice. But I'm a Bob Fenner/Anthony Calfo fan... hee hee!

[WaterKeeper]

Those "Our Gang" people don't like me anyhow.

Emphysematous, aka, "gas bubble disease" is a human ailment that somehow has been transmitted to fish, or, at least by some of those writing literature in this hobby, would have one believe. It is more or less a catch all term for an embolism caused when gases dissolved in the blood or tissue expand causing damage. It is similar to decompression sickness, "The Bends", experienced by divers. Gasses become supersaturated in the body and, when barometric pressure is suddenly released, create embolisms.

The key point here is dissolved gasses. The gas that causes such a problem must be dissolved to enter the blood or tissue. Only when the gas is supersaturated in solution and the temperature or pressure changes do problems result. Visible bubbles in one's tank are not dissolved in the water and if a fish swallow them it is no different than a human drinking a Coke onboard an ascending aircraft. Sure they swell as the pressure decreases but the net result is a burp.

I'll stand by my statement that bubbles have not proven to be associated with any known fish disease. And you can tell that to Spanky too.

[Jr.ReefKeeper29]

not sure

[vegandago]

If anything, micro bubbles are a GOOD thing, not bad. They look like ****, which is why people don't like them, but from a functional standpoint, they are great for gas exchange.

[TimD]

Tom, thanks for the Borneman link. I knew I had seen that picture of the wave breaking over a reef in a similar discussion a while back, and when the topic came up in yet another thread more recently, I went searching for that picture and came up empty.

[Steven Pro]

Noga does list Gas Supersaturation (Gas Bubble Disease) as a problem, but I have not had a chance to read the section yet. I will try to read it and reply later.

That said, my pumps routinely grab air and spit bubbles into my tank all the time without any apparent harmful effects.

Also, the scenario Bob relays in the above passage and link occurred in a cold, freshwater kio pond, a very different environment than our warm, marine displays.

[bkiba]

the only real problems microbubbles will cause are:

-increased salt spray on your hood/lights
-increase evaporation rate
-decrease in visibility / light to corals
-they may build up in a pump and shorten its life

Other than that - like MOE said they are harmless. Some may claim air caught in sponges will kill them, but I have tons of sponges and microbubbles in my tank (I think the sponges need to be completley out of the water for the air entrapment to occur).

Possible advantage:
Increased dissolved O2 (a good thing IMO). I can't see getting the O2 levels so high as to cause biological problems just from microbubbles - maybe using ozone or something.

[BTTRFLYGRL]

I am probably wrong but I do believe I read that .I am going to look it up on wwm right now

[BTTRFLYGRL]

Okay. The article is referring to pond pets but their are other referrences to marine fish. I tried to paste and copy, no luck. you can read about it on wwm under; Bubble trouble and aquarium systems. question titled 'air bubbles and fish spots' This answered by Bob Fenner. I am sure there may be other but I am spending way to much time on these websites and I got things to catch up on

[Steven Pro]

Originally posted by StevenPro
Noga does list Gas Supersaturation (Gas Bubble Disease) as a problem, but I have not had a chance to read the section yet. I will try to read it and reply later.

That said, my pumps routinely grab air and spit bubbles into my tank all the time without any apparent harmful effects.

Also, the scenario Bob relays in the above passage and link occurred in a cold, freshwater kio pond, a very different environment than our warm, marine displays.

I read that passage from Noga's "Fish Disease" book last night. It almost all applies to pond fish and commercial aquaculture; feeding a pond from a deep well or spring, high waterfalls, heavy plant growth if a very clear pond, and pump air intake. The biggest point of interest is Noga rates warm water marine and fresh water occurances as rare with cold water fresh as uncommon.

[bkiba]

I guess it makes sense for pond fish to be more affected by to much dissolved O2.

Gas solubility in liquids in inversley proportional to temperature in general (certainly for water). So a cold pond can hold more mg/L of dissolved O2 than a warm tropical marine setup.

But you aren't going to be able to supersturate a marine tank with too many microbubbles. You will need a source of high pressure oxygen gas to force that much O2 into a warm system.

Do we have values of what too high a level of O2 is? My guess is that it isn't close to normal marine readings.

[greenbean36191]

While I respect Eric, I think he may have oversimplified the issue a bit. Sure corals on the reef crest are exposed to microbubbles all the time, but not all of the corals we have are from the reef crest. IME some of them ARE irritated and sometimes even damaged by excess microbubbles.

Every few months I will break down my skimmer and give the whole thing, pump and all, a good cleaning. After I put it on the tank it will make a constant stream of microbubbles for about a day or so and fill the tank with them. It's not a huge amount of bubbles, just enough to make the tank look sort of cloudy. While the tank is bubbly a few of my acroporas, and a few other corals will slime constantly. The slime can be bad news for other corals because of the chemicals in it, and if it went on for longer than a day or so it would be bad for the corals producing it too since slime takes a lot of resources to produce. Bubbles collecting on the underside of one of my plating Montiporas have killed a small area of the edge where they escape too. A few days after the bubbles killed it back, it started to recover and is still doing well. I have also seen bubbles trapped by the base of a splitting Caulastrea polyp lift the tissue away from the skeleton.

I doubt that they harm fish, but IME if present for a long enough time they can and sometimes do harm corals.

[jay24k]

If bubbles are sticking underneath the corals, I would think you don't have enough flow. I would agree that bubbles can be an issue on corals but not ones just flowing around ime.