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where can i find more info on bioload?
did anyone tried to figure out what's the load of every species? what about fish mass?

i have an idea how to check it, and i don't think it will hurt the fish at all, but it takes a lot of time and effort to do.

I have asked that question on a post as well. I didn't get many responses I'm curious myself, but I'm learning slowly.

Mine is:
http://www.fishprofiles.com/interactive/forums/thread.asp?id=46175

sorry for double posting. i did search for "bioload calculation"

if some people will like to contribute, it might be interesting to research it ourselves.
i thought to do it this way:
1. have fresh water ready. make it ammonia-free.
2. throw in an ammonia detector to be sure the fish are safe in the process.
2. put a known ammount of water in a large bowl or small tank.
3. put a fish or several fish of the same speices in the bowl/tank, and let them stay there for long enough (they should be fed in that time).
4. after a certain ammount of time, put the fish in the intended tank, and measure ammonia in the water.
5 (optional) a. take some ammount of water, weight it.
5b. insert the fish or several fish if they're small enough, and weight them again. make a record of their mass by substracting the two measurements.

that way we know the ammount of amonia produced in that time (ppm will give us a good idea, because we know how much water was used), and so we could have a waste/(time*individual) measure and maybe a waste/(time*mass) for each species.

what do you think?

Right direction, wrong experiment. Bioload, in the sense of the nitrogen cycle, is determined by input nitrogen. Fish don't automagically generate ammonia as a result of living; it's a waste product of their body processes. The only way for nitrogen to enter a typical tank is by the addition of food, so a better experiment would be to examine the food and energy requirements of various fish to get an idea of their metabolic rates.

is there any better way to check it than letting them live and observe?
it's much easier to measure the tank water for disolved substance than calculate the ammount of substance from the solid food.

Yes, but if you were designing an experiment for publication, it would almost certainly be necessary to control what exactly is given as food, in which case you know exactly how much nitrogen is being added. You can't base it on ammonia levels, because the ammonia levels are almost entirely a function of how much food is added to the tank, so that the experiment is accomplishing nothing but to tell you how much you've been feeding.

do i have any other way to test how much they should eat without feeding them?
how much do you think it will be a factor of brand of food manufacturer?

Just want to add it would be hard to measure the amount of ammonia being produced as water also evaporates from the tank and the emount evaporated varies depending on water flow, humidity in your home etc...

The Amazon Nut...