can Ammonia drop that quickly?

on saturday i had a reading of 4.0 ammonia on my 55 gal fish tank. i just added base rokc that has dead things on it. to day i tested and got .25 ammonia. i thought this must be wrong so i triple tested it. same thing every time. so, is this correct or impossible? my trites are off the scale now too.

 

If nitrites went up by alot, then it makes sense. Bacteria multiply at an exponential rate, so if they were consuming 1 ppm now, in an hour (mean time between divisions; may be longer or shorter depending on temp/species of bacteria, but bacteria in general have a very short reproduction time, measured in minutes to hours) they'd consume 2 ppm, then in another hour 4, then 8.....it really does happen very quickly once the population hits the exponential 'elbow'.

 

More simply put ohhh yeahhh baby

 

mine dropped from 4 to .75 overnight, then to 0 two days later

then my nitrites went from 2 to 5 to 0 in about a week

 

right now ammonia is between .25 and 0.

nitrites are still high. hopefully in a week everything will be good.