The Benefits Of Pond Bacteria

When we talk about the overall benefits of using bacteria in a pond it's hard to decide where to start. There are so many positive things that come about from working with this natural (although manmade in formula) approach to pond care.

In nature, good bugs and bacteria are nothing new. They are all around us and have been for a million years or more. In fact mother nature uses beneficial bacteria to help keep ponds cleaner.

When leaves or algae, or anything natural dies, it will often sink to the bottom of a pond. This build up has to be assimilated or broken down in some way, otherwise the pond would eventually fill in with sediment. Some ponds surely do over time, but others remain healthy over the long term.

In those that do, it's a good bet that somewhere in the pond there is a colony or population of bacteria that's doing all the dirty work of cleaning the pond bottom up and dealing with all the things that could influence the pond's balance.

It would be wrong to call beneficial bacteria an algae killer. It is not an algaecide and it really doesn't harm anything directly. This makes it a much safer alternative to chemcials that do kill algae outright. There may be a time and place for these, but many people end up having problems with them over the long term. Some folks kill fish through mistakes in application, and in other cases the ponds health suffers from continued use.

Where bacteria helps is in the fact that it consumes or eats, much of the same nutrients that algae likes to feed on. When these nutrients are lowered in a pond, algae will have a much harder time in growing. And when it works well, algae won't be able to grow at all.

When we talk about using bacteria or chemicals we often suggest that the two work in directly opposing ways. Algaecides kill algae but they don't attack the root of the problem (high nutrients) and as dead algae builds up at the bottom of the pond, it breaks down, raising nutrients once again, which fosters more algae growth. For many pond owners this isn't the direction they want to go in.

When bacteria is used the process is actually reversed. The root of the problem is targeted well. And the symptom of high nutrient loads (algae) begins to decline. At the same time, dead algae begins to be broken down and reduced, which also lowers nutrients in the pond. If one is to believe what science has told us...and that is that algae thrives in high nutrient environments, then at least to us, this sounds more like the path one should take.

And amazingly many pond owners can do this without the use of chemicals that can harm their fish. In fairness, it's usually not the algaecide that causes the problem. Most often it's how it's applied. If a quick kill chemical is used to treat and heavy algae infestation, and much of the algae is killed off quickly, it will inevitably pull oxygen from the water just as quickly. Unfortunately fish can handle low oxygen or rapid changes and usually this is when a pond owner may run into a fish die off following a rapid algae kill.

Bacteria works much more gradully than this, which adds greatly to is safety buffer. And when bacteria and something like aeration is combined, the two systems work well to create a very healthy pond environment for fish and other aquatic creatures.

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