Hey dr. Tim, can you explain why biospira originally required refrigeration but now does not?Hello Everyone:
DrTim from DrTim's Aquatics and the developer of DrTim's One and Only. I thought I would try to answer some of the questions about how bacteria can stay alive in a bottle. I can only speak for my product and what we did at Marineland with BioSpira which I also developed. I have been studying and growing nitrifiers for over 20 years for reference so have a lot of experience with these bugs.
First and most obvious bacteria, including nitrifying bacteria, are not human. They do not have lungs or much of anything else humans or other multi-cellular organisms have in terms of needs to survive. So first, they do not need oxygen to survive. They need oxygen to convert ammonia to nitrite or nitrite to nitrate but that is to gain energy which to a bacterium is different than surviving. So the liquid in the bottle does not need a constant supply of oxygen unless one wants the bacteria to be dividing in the bottle. Thus if you don't add ammonia to the bottle there is not need to supplement with oxygen and the bacteria do quite well.
So if don't they feed (no ammonia or nitrite in the bottle) and don't require oxygen how to they survive. The answer is that all bacteria have cellular mechanisms to adapt and survive when conditions are not good for them. Many bacteria form spores. Nitrifiers do not form spores but produce a sugar inside that cell that helps them survive in poor conditions.
The other thing about bacteria is that they are hard to kill. Unless you break the cell open or disrupt the DNA/RNA or poison the cell (and some other things) the bacterium survive in a viable state. That is why they have been around for so long. Further, nitrifying bacteria live in a biofilm that acts as additional protection.
So how can they survive? Think of the nitrifier cell as a rechargeable battery. It's bottled at 100% energy level and since the organism does not have any ammonia or nitrite to feed on it does not have to spend any energy reproducing. Also since the conditions are not optimal for reproducing it goes into a resting stage and uses very little energy from its energy center waiting for conditions to improve. In this state they can last a long time in a bottle and work once poured into your tank. And the last key things is that the nitrifiers have to be the right species but that another story!
While many people think heat kills nitrifiers that is not true unless you get the liquid really hot what kills them is freezing. If the liquid is frozen solid for a period of time the ice crystals that form puncture the cell wall killing the bacteria.
So keep the nitrifying bacteria viable in a bottle you don't need secret sauce, you don't need to add amino acids or ammonia or nitrite. You need the have the right bacteria in the bottle to start (the key difference among products) and you need to keep the bottle from freezing.
I hope this explains a few things about nitrifiers - DrTim
Thanks