The present work was aimed at evaluating the surface coatings characteristics and autocatalytic manganese oxidation potentials of two groups of "aged" biofilter media. This refers to the anthracite filter media of a biological water treatment plant on which metal oxides and a biofilm have deposited on the surface of the filter media over long time of filtration. Duplicate samples of anthracite filter media were collected from each of the six filter wells in the plant and classified into two groups, based on their duration of operation, as 3-years filter media and 15-years filter media. Batch experiments showed that the 15-years filter media exhibited very high manganese sorption capacity and were less dependent on the microbial activity than the 3-years filter media. Results of the surface coatings analyses indicated that the biofilter materials is predominantly composed of variable layers of manganese and iron oxides, with microbial biomass contributing only about 3.5 and 1.4% of the dry weight of the surface coatings on the 3- and 15-years filter media respectively. Investigations onto the Mn2+ sorption by the lyophilized biofilter media showed that, the sorption kinetics on the catalytic oxides layers followed the pseudo-second-order kinetics model, thus suggesting chemisorption as the dominant mechanism of Mn2+ removal. This implied that manganese removal by these biofilters is mainly by adsorption of Mn2+ onto the iron and manganese (catalytic) oxides layers and autocatalytic oxidation. The present study has clearly linked Mn2+ oxidation to the catalytic oxides layers on the aged biofilter media. (C) 2008, The Society for Biotechnology, Japan. All rights reserved.