How toxic is ammonia, really?

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Randy Holmes-Farley

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Your points are valid, however I would raise a complicating issue. I have not read the primary literature carefully, but I would expect there is one significant limitation. While valid, the experiments have only a single variable-artificially elevated ammonia. Therefore these experiments show only that fish can tolerate high ammonia when other parameters are otherwise reasonable.

I would argue that in most 'real world' cases of elevated ammonia, there are probably other less than ideal parameters-the ammonia elevation does not occur in isolation. There may be concurrent increase in CO2/decrease in oxygen/temperature swings etc if the elevated ammonia is due to prolonged shipping for example. It is quite possible that when other parameters are less than ideal, the effective LC50 of ammonia is lower. Therefore it is theoretically possible (although I remain skeptical) that in these real-world situations, ammonia may be toxic at lower levels, and Prime etc is of some benefit, at least in some situations.

I would suggest that the best way to really address this is to perform similar experiments with and without Prime, see if there is a significant difference in survival, and if there is then perform further experiments to see if the effect is really related to 'ammonia detoxification' or some other mechanism. Until it is shown that Prime does not enhance survival, I think the argument can always be made that through some mysterious and marvelous mechanism Prime makes ammonia less toxic and is therefore beneficial.

I don’t disagree that an actual tox test would be desirable, but there are numerous issues including ethical issues of killing fish by ammonia poisoning.
 

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I don’t disagree that an actual tox test would be desirable, but there are numerous issues including ethical issues of killing fish by ammonia poisoning.
Agree-realistically I don’t think this will be done, especially with the ornamental species aquarists favor. But there is still the technical possibility that Prime somehow detoxifies ammonia. It is not always easy or practical to prove a negative.
 

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What other factors might impact fishes that are dropped into an uncycled tank so that they perish before the cycle is finished?
Do typical ammonia levels rise above these LC50 numbers, or even to acute levels in a typical new tank set-up?

Do bacterial blooms lower O2 to acutely toxic levels?

I have always heard it was the ammonia that did uncycled fish tanks in, so now I am wondering about this.
 

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Is the takeaway for the average hobbyist to avoid chemically treating ammonia in the water column and instead dilute it the old fashioned way through water changes?
 
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Randy Holmes-Farley

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Agree-realistically I don’t think this will be done, especially with the ornamental species aquarists favor. But there is still the technical possibility that Prime somehow detoxifies ammonia. It is not always easy or practical to prove a negative.

True, it is hard to prove a negative, which is likely why it is still on the market. Whether it 'works" or not, it undoubtedly does not work the way Seachem claims.

But lets look deeper into the claims from Seachem:


When should I use the emergency dose of 5 x the recommended amount of Prime®?
A: If your ammonia or nitrite levels are above 2 ppm, you can safely use up to 5 x the recommended amount.


So normally, folks would use Seachem Prime when ammonia is less than 2 ppm. By the above scientific data, few fish will die at less than 2 ppm ammonia. Consequently, Prime won't fail in its normal recommended application even if it did nothing.

Emergency? Folks at 2 ppm think it's an emergency, dose 5x the normal amount, and WOW, fish survive. What a fabulous product it saved my fish. Not. Adding Ro/DI water would also save those fish.
 
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Randy Holmes-Farley

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Is the takeaway for the average hobbyist to avoid chemically treating ammonia in the water column and instead dilute it the old fashioned way through water changes?

Or rely on bacteria in some fashion, yes.
 
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What other factors might impact fishes that are dropped into an uncycled tank so that they perish before the cycle is finished?
Do typical ammonia levels rise above these LC50 numbers, or even to acute levels in a typical new tank set-up?

Do bacterial blooms lower O2 to acutely toxic levels?

I have always heard it was the ammonia that did uncycled fish tanks in, so now I am wondering about this.
I do not know. I've not seen anyone track ammonia levels in an uncycled tank.
 
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So it sounds to me that the takeaway here is that ammonia is most certainly toxic, but not necessarily at the levels that most people start to worry about it?

Complicated question, but folks should not expect fish to die at 1-3 ppm ammonia in a day or two. They may suffer significant harm of some sort, however, and I'd recommend avoiding it.
 

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Randy do you have any ld50 data for lysmata cleaner shrimp

I've used the presence of those several times in ammonia troubleshoot threads/non digital test kit for nh4 showing a concerning level, in a matured tank, but 100% of all animals are symptomless including lysmata which are the weakest motile animals we keep in reefing perhaps just shy of basket stars and linkia stars.

presence of lysmata shrimp acting normally is a huge proof mechanism we use to verify stated test levels, curious if you have any data for that specific animal.

post #11 I bet is a complete ammonia misread if this was a display tank. if it was a low surface area quarantine tank I'd buy it. a display? nope. false readings create false ammonia concerns and then dosing in prime to an unchallenged system seems to fix something that never was in peril.


@kecked

can you give these details:

age of the display tank in question/or was it a quarantine tank

do you have any threads posted at the time of the event in question, so we can see pics of the tank from the thread?

I have a running collection tens of pages long on API misreads, and the internet has about twenty year's worth on file too, so I'm curious to see your scenario contrasted to the known misreads for api. we even have some stated 8 ppm / help events here in running display tanks, symptomless + no deaths in the tank, so your 1.5 levels aren't alarming at all. we always look to discover how ammonia could have risen in a display tank to lethal levels. other than the guy who had a bleach in his tank event recently, we never find those causes. it's always a test issue so far.
 
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brandon429

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the point of my post is nobody really knows when their ammonia hits toxic levels, because the testers we use can be found in searches showing complete misreads for pages/years

for example, regarding toxicity, see this red sea ammonia kit misread collection. it's 9 pages and not one tank, not one single tank, was in peril, they're all misreads/see the thread analyses

I would love to see an input source for any single example for the dangerous ammonia claimed here:



*its not that those tanks had an ammonia spike, and the toxicity was below ld50 for the animals, it's that they did NOT have a spike, and thought they did and were trained to believe their test kit no matter what, without any context verification whatsoever.

the point of posting that thread is to show that reefers don't actually know much about their ammonia levels until they get the right kit.

on that note, are there any nine page seneye false ammonia reading threads? anywhere on the entire internet? hmm...

if we just stop challenging stated test results, and accept anyone's stated ammonia event as fact, new cycling science will die back and old cycling science/panic training/will continue to be the standard everyone uses.


I have never seen any thread in all of reefing where reefers are challenged on there ammonia levels other than the ones I have linked. we are all trained in reefing to simply accept whatever a test kit says, regardless of context, regardless of the truth.

sustained ammonia spikes in display tanks are larks, falsies, and don't occur unless something very rare happens (such as the recent post where a lot of bleach got into the tank)

it's clear from our 9 page analysis thread not any poster had a source of impact, they merely had a red sea kit showing some nh4 and then they flipped out while believing that kit. that, is old cycling science.
 
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Randy do you have any ld50 data for lysmata cleaner shrimp

I've used the presence of those several times in ammonia troubleshoot threads/non digital test kit for nh4 showing a concerning level, in a matured tank, but 100% of all animals are symptomless including lysmata which are the weakest motile animals we keep in reefing perhaps just shy of basket stars and linkia stars.

presence of lysmata shrimp acting normally is a huge proof mechanism we use to verify stated test levels, curious if you have any data for that specific animal.

post #11 I bet is a complete ammonia misread if this was a display tank. if it was a low surface area quarantine tank I'd buy it. a display? nope. false readings create false ammonia concerns and then dosing in prime to an unchallenged system seems to fix something that never was in peril.


@kecked

can you give these details:

age of the display tank in question/or was it a quarantine tank

do you have any threads posted at the time of the event in question, so we can see pics of the tank from the thread?

I have a running collection tens of pages long on API misreads, and the internet has about twenty year's worth on file too, so I'm curious to see your scenario contrasted to the known misreads for api. we even have some stated 8 ppm / help events here in running display tanks, symptomless + no deaths in the tank, so your 1.5 levels aren't alarming at all. we always look to discover how ammonia could have risen in a display tank to lethal levels. other than the guy who had a bleach in his tank event recently, we never find those causes. it's always a test issue so far.

Not that species, but here's a different shrimp:

Acute Toxicity of Ammonia, Nitrite and Nitrate to Shrimp Litopenaeus vannamei Postlarvae in Low-Salinity Water

LD50 in 30 ppt seawater was 16-48 ppm total ammonia when tested over 96 to 24 h.
 

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For kicks, people might try testing the ammonia in shipping bags for livestock that comes through normal and healthy. Just to see what sorts of ammonia levels livestock do experience short term for a day or two without dying.
Here's what I got a for bags of herbivores from Reefcleaners. The turbo snails were in 10-25ppm total ammonia. All livestock ended up fine and acclimated to my tank without losses.
Ok here you go:

The amount of ammonia was highly variable - these inverts shipping bags end up with very different amounts of ammonia under these conditions.

Mini ceriths, big ceriths, and the racquetball sized rock urchins had:
a) 0 - 1 ppm total ammonia

The crabs and ping-pong ball sized pincushion urchins bags had:
b) 1-3 ppm total ammonia

The turbos water, however blew up the test. Off the charts and I had to do 1/2 and 1/4 dilutions (2nd pic) to get an estimate.

Raw ammonia shipping bag.jpg

Diluted Turbo bags.jpg


Not to be too precise here - Let's call turbo bag 1 on the left maybe 15-25 ppm, and Turbo bag 2 on the right around 10-15 ppm.

so two bags of small turbos, 2 snails in each bag were:
d) 10-30 ppm

(I sanity checked these with some NH3 films, so no API griping allowed.)

the pH in these sample bags was around 7.6-7.8 for the lowest ammonia values, 7.5-7.6 for the medium ammonia values and 7.4-7.5 for the high ammonia Turbo bags.

The bags were not warm, essentially room temp 72, so this puts the Free ammonia - NH3 in the ballpark of 0.1 to 0.3 ppm NH3 in the turbo bags.

Don't paint with too broad brush here. Some animals will generate and survive lots of ammonia short term. Others generate very little. Some might be more sensitive. Also, they did not sit at these ammonia levels for a whole day - the ammonia climbed from zero to this level gradually over ~28 hours.

link to post
 

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1.06 ppm free ammonia, which corresponds to ~25 ppm total ammonia at pH 8.
So how much of this is just confusion about what the tests are measuring? A reefer runs a test and reads 10ppm ammonia and panics - not realizing it was a measure of total ammonia, and their free ammonia is actually the much less immediately deadly 0.5ppm.
 
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So how much of this is just confusion about what the tests are measuring? A reefer runs a test and reads 10ppm ammonia and panics - not realizing it was a measure of total ammonia, and their free ammonia is actually the much less immediately deadly 0.5ppm.

Some, certainly, but most reefers seem to just think that 2 ppm total ammonia is deadly, and the companies peddling ammonia binders feed into that idea.

The Fritz ammonia binder, for example,


Use 1 cap (1 tsp/5 ml) per 10 U.S. gallons (38 L). Using this dosage, 1.0 mg/L ammonia will be instantly eliminated...or in emergency situations with very high ammonia levels, dosage can be safely increased or repeated up to 5x.
  • Detoxifies up to 1 ppm Ammonia per dose
  • Overdosed? It is safe to increase dosage up to 5x. Observe livestock for distress, perform small water changes if needed

So by the Fritz info, one could not ever save livestock from dying because it is only useful up to 5 ppm ammonia.
 

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the point of my post is nobody really knows when their ammonia hits toxic levels, because the testers we use can be found in searches showing complete misreads for pages/years

for example, regarding toxicity, see this red sea ammonia kit misread collection. it's 9 pages and not one tank, not one single tank, was in peril, they're all misreads/see the thread analyses

I would love to see an input source for any single example for the dangerous ammonia claimed here:



*its not that those tanks had an ammonia spike, and the toxicity was below ld50 for the animals, it's that they did NOT have a spike, and thought they did and were trained to believe their test kit no matter what, without any context verification whatsoever.

the point of posting that thread is to show that reefers don't actually know much about their ammonia levels until they get the right kit.

on that note, are there any nine page seneye false ammonia reading threads? anywhere on the entire internet? hmm...

if we just stop challenging stated test results, and accept anyone's stated ammonia event as fact, new cycling science will die back and old cycling science/panic training/will continue to be the standard everyone uses.


I have never seen any thread in all of reefing where reefers are challenged on there ammonia levels other than the ones I have linked. we are all trained in reefing to simply accept whatever a test kit says, regardless of context, regardless of the truth.

sustained ammonia spikes in display tanks are larks, falsies, and don't occur unless something very rare happens (such as the recent post where a lot of bleach got into the tank)

it's clear from our 9 page analysis thread not any poster had a source of impact, they merely had a red sea kit showing some nh4 and then they flipped out while believing that kit. that, is old cycling science.

So are you saying the only way to test for ammonia reliably is with Seneye? There is no other test a hobbyist can do? It's Seneye or nothing?
 

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Some, certainly, but most reefers seem to just think that 2 ppm total ammonia is deadly, and the companies peddling ammonia binders feed into that idea.

The Fritz ammonia binder, for example,


Use 1 cap (1 tsp/5 ml) per 10 U.S. gallons (38 L). Using this dosage, 1.0 mg/L ammonia will be instantly eliminated...or in emergency situations with very high ammonia levels, dosage can be safely increased or repeated up to 5x.
  • Detoxifies up to 1 ppm Ammonia per dose
  • Overdosed? It is safe to increase dosage up to 5x. Observe livestock for distress, perform small water changes if needed

So by the Fritz info, one could not ever save livestock from dying because it is only useful up to 5 ppm ammonia.

Sorry, my brain is really fried on this subject. So, when using something like a Redsea test kit, what reading is a real concern? If I'm reading something like 0.8 to 1.2 PPM what does that really mean for the health of my fish. I've tried to piece it all together but I'm tired and my head is reeling.
 

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Some, certainly, but most reefers seem to just think that 2 ppm total ammonia is deadly, and the companies peddling ammonia binders feed into that idea.

The Fritz ammonia binder, for example,


Use 1 cap (1 tsp/5 ml) per 10 U.S. gallons (38 L). Using this dosage, 1.0 mg/L ammonia will be instantly eliminated...or in emergency situations with very high ammonia levels, dosage can be safely increased or repeated up to 5x.
  • Detoxifies up to 1 ppm Ammonia per dose
  • Overdosed? It is safe to increase dosage up to 5x. Observe livestock for distress, perform small water changes if needed

So by the Fritz info, one could not ever save livestock from dying because it is only useful up to 5 ppm ammonia.

Sorry, my brain is really fried on this subject. So, when using something like a Redsea test kit, what reading is a real concern? If I'm reading something like 0.8 to 1.2 PPM what does that really mean for the health of my fish. I've tried to piece it all together but I'm tired and my head is reeling.

EDIT: Sorry, double post.
 
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Do you currently have elevated ammonia?

1 ppm total ammonia is not going to immediately kill fish. But it is very possibly unhealthy for them and I'd do something about it.

That said, 1 ppm is unlikely in an established reef tank.
 

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