Flampton
I hope in future works we get to see practical application of bacteria alongside their metabolic differences and classifications
Cycle stalled
This is the first time I've ever used a product to aid in cycling a tank and I'm confused by where I'm at today. I used Red Sea Reef Mature Pro and things seemed on track at first but now I'm way off the targets. I'm at 5 weeks now and have .2 Ammonia, 1+ Nitrite, and 50+ Nitrate. I've been...www.reef2reef.com
That thread is very impactful to me.
It is a microcosm of today's hobby view on what cycling bacteria do, whether classic nitrifiers or heterotrophs stepping up to the plate can carry a bioload, in the end people simply want to know when they can start to reef.
False notions in what filter bacteria are doing drive sales in this hobby to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to unstick cycles that never were stuck. bottle bac sellers tell us cycles can stall, and have a product ready to remedy.
Our hobby cannot even agree of whether nitrite testing should factor. of course everyone says it should, but they will ignore 200 nitrite positive reef starts we have on file with updates as well, rules are broken daily in reef tank cycling and we need formal works on that. We have enough data to permanently exclude nitrite measurement in reef tank cycling, but it is ignored. Offsetting stuck nitrite readings is a large driver of bottle bac sales...we collect those reaction purchase threads for pattern study as well.
It is very important to state that in understanding bacteria, we must be able to simply cycle reef tanks consistently. That is currently not the case for the hobby, nobody is in agreement on what we should measure, how long we should wait etc
there are some people in agreement: the twenty thousand or so reef tanks set up at MACNA conventions all to meet the start date, the sales date, of the convention. given the right motivation and bacterial understanding, we can either be stuck in a cycle for 80 days or we can have the reef ready by this friday, two days from now, and never fail.
I say until we can cycle reef tanks consistently in this hobby, we don't really understand the bacteria though they might classify in different ways and perform known functions when evaluated alone/not in a meshing of tank life.
I will talk more about this in the nitrogen cycling or lack thereof in the next post. Currently rewriting this post as an article. It will be much improved.
I thought of you when I was checking out the patent for Marineland Bio-Spira (Freshwater) and Instant Ocean Biospira (Saltwater). It is advertised as instant cycling and truly is the only product I would trust if forced in this direction. Why would I trust this one, well I read the science within the patent. This patent only focuses on the ammonia oxidizing bacteria in their product, haven't looked for the nitrite utilizing bacteria patent yet as it is less important.
Patent Public Search | USPTO
patft.uspto.gov
Basically if you go down to bacterial additive test IX-
They added their bacteria and 6 ocellaris clownfish to a 10 gallon aquarium and fed twice daily. The control had the same setup but received no bacteria. The bacteria treated tanks reached 0 ammonia in 9 days, while untreated took 17 days. What is I believe more important to this test was that the mean maximum ammonia concentration in treated was 0.4 ppm while in the untreated tank it was 1.72ppm. That is a huge difference! Still toxic but obviously much less so. And that is with six clowns in a ten gallon sterilized new tank setup.