"Biodiversity is dead, long live biodiversity" 10 month microbiome data from BRStv.

[livinlifeinBKK]

I like that they introduce ideas which many reefers wouldn't have even though of or known anything about otherwise. After that introduction to the very basics if the hobbyist wishes to learn more they need to do their own further research.

 

[livinlifeinBKK]

Those ideas can unfortunately be taken completely out of context at times however...

 

[kenchilada]

This religion of pseudo science concerning biodiversity and bacterial composition has always been strange to me.

Let me summarize it for you… who cares. What a massive waste of time. We already went down this rabbit hole with Ron Shimek.

If your goal is to have a mature stable successful reef aquarium, just replicate the things that 50+ years of successful hobbyists before you have done. It will ultimately come down to good husbandry and a strong bull**** filter.

 

[vlangel]

I personally enjoyed watching the experiment of the 12 tanks and how they progressed and I did feel that BRS explained well the difference between diversity and balance in a tank. I liked watching how when one organism is out of balance with no competition or predators, how it can quickly take over. However, when there is a good balance of the organisms that make up a healthy reef, then even the introduction of what is considered an undesirable organism, the impact is much more manageable. In my 25 years of reefing, my personal experience supports this idea which is why I try not to always be setting up a new tank or deal with a problem in my established tank by a drastic means. My tank now in its 7th year seems to do excellent with just small faithful water changes and minimal maintenance, (usually syphoning out the bubble algae periodically that appear). I have learned a lot from BRS and although I know they provide info to sell products, I have found them helpful and not manipulative.

 

[taricha]

If your goal is to have a mature stable successful reef aquarium, just replicate the things that 50+ years of successful hobbyists before you have done. It will ultimately come down to good husbandry and a strong bull**** filter.

Quite true, to be provocative I'd say - just because people have done things for decades and done well, don't exempt it entirely from your BSfilter.

 

[livinlifeinBKK]

Quite true, to be provocative I'd say - just because people have done things for decades and done well, don't exempt it entirely from your BSfilter.

The reason I like to use live ocean rock due to the bacterial biodiversity is partly because although I know the bacterial diversity won't last, I like the idea of allowing whatever natural bacteria will become dominant to become the dominant strain(s) since it seems likely it would turn out to be a strain not present in additives.

 

[livinlifeinBKK]

Also, real ocean live rock covered in coralline is just absolutely beautiful to me and almost like an organism itself to me even though the rock itself isn't living.

 

[Paul B]

Here is some diversity meaning bacteria and amphipods I just collected and dumped in my tank. Thousands of them along with mud and seaweed.

 

[kneselkroll]

True @livinlifeinBKK, I'm always skeptical of something that is offered in this hobby that few or no one can verify. I will say - at least on the coral pathogen side of things, this is actually happening. University microbiology labs are also testing the emerging story of the connections between captive coral disease, specific bacterial species, and their treatments with antibiotics. So far the results I'm aware of are telling the same story whether by aquabiomics or academic labs.

I'm doubtful this hobby can support multiple water DNA testing services when the benefits of such services are so debatable and the info provided so technical. Feels like a small potential pool of users.

I agree with you, I also did research on coral pathogen and it seems to be very unclear

 

[taricha]

I agree with you, I also did research on coral pathogen and it seems to be very unclear

Just to put this lack of clarity in perspective, tying an observed coral disease in a hobby coral to a specific pathogen had not been a thing that had ever been done - before the last year or two.

 

[LRT]

Just to put this lack of clarity in perspective, tying an observed coral disease in a hobby coral to a specific pathogen had not been a thing that had ever been done - before the last year or two.

Hi @taricha I love these threads. Thank you for what you do. This is a fascinating subject for sure.
Do you have or know of anyone that has a thread, papers or data tracking known hobbyist coral pathogens and antibiotics/medications used to treat them succesfully?
I'd love to see a thread and discussion this subject. I wish @AquaBiomics would post more on here about this.

 

[Dan_P]

This religion of pseudo science concerning biodiversity and bacterial composition has always been strange to me.

Let me summarize it for you… who cares. What a massive waste of time. We already went down this rabbit hole with Ron Shimek.

If your goal is to have a mature stable successful reef aquarium, just replicate the things that 50+ years of successful hobbyists before you have done. It will ultimately come down to good husbandry and a strong bull**** filter.

I am kinda on the same page. Definitely agree that a strong BS filter is needed because the stuff gets generated with greater efficiency than it did 50 years ago thanks to the internet. If it’s on YouTube it must be true. The BRS experiment was a messy affair.

The successful aquarium is highly correlated (I conjecture) with the aquarist. There are some folks who “get” how to care for animals and there are the rest who need to work very hard to be successful. The majority of the latter group do not like to work hard.

The bacterial biodiversity narrative is another flavor of the month explanation for a successful aquarium. I for one have under appreciated their role in the aquarium but they are not the microscopic gods of good luck.

 

[areefer01]

The successful aquarium is highly correlated (I conjecture) with the aquarist. There are some folks who “get” how to care for animals and there are the rest who need to work very hard to be successful. The majority of the latter group do not like to work hard.

Just to clarify we are talking about our hobby, right? Teasing aside I think most long term hobbyist would agree with this. Few have asked me about my tank in passing and wondered how they could get started. Once I mentioned it should be viewed a long term commitment like keeping a parrot or raising a child a few of them chuckled and said no thank you

The bacterial biodiversity narrative is another flavor of the month explanation for a successful aquarium. I for one have under appreciated their role in the aquarium but they are not the microscopic gods of good luck.

I wanted it to be a thing. Being honest I really did. Having run a couple tests in 2021 and again this past month I have to say it isn't ready for prime time (in my opinion). There is no longer time available for them to review each test and provide personal feedback, the data isn't presented such that one can plot out trends or do their own analysis (their reports have even changed between 2021 and today), and linking of some content to WikipediA is, well, dangerous in my opinion as contributors are volunteers. Who says they updated it correctly? More importantly I really want to know who's display they are comparing my sample to and can I see a photo of that display, its age, so I can compare to mine.

I still have hope that they can work through their process, reports, timeliness, and presentation layer but in my experience it wouldn't be something I'd recommend.

 

[kneselkroll]

I am kinda on the same page. Definitely agree that a strong BS filter is needed because the stuff gets generated with greater efficiency than it did 50 years ago thanks to the internet. If it’s on YouTube it must be true. The BRS experiment was a messy affair.

The successful aquarium is highly correlated (I conjecture) with the aquarist. There are some folks who “get” how to care for animals and there are the rest who need to work very hard to be successful. The majority of the latter group do not like to work hard.

The bacterial biodiversity narrative is another flavor of the month explanation for a successful aquarium. I for one have under appreciated their role in the aquarium but they are not the microscopic gods of good luck.

Just to clarify we are talking about our hobby, right? Teasing aside I think most long term hobbyist would agree with this. Few have asked me about my tank in passing and wondered how they could get started. Once I mentioned it should be viewed a long term commitment like keeping a parrot or raising a child a few of them chuckled and said no thank you



I wanted it to be a thing. Being honest I really did. Having run a couple tests in 2021 and again this past month I have to say it isn't ready for prime time (in my opinion). There is no longer time available for them to review each test and provide personal feedback, the data isn't presented such that one can plot out trends or do their own analysis (their reports have even changed between 2021 and today), and linking of some content to WikipediA is, well, dangerous in my opinion as contributors are volunteers. Who says they updated it correctly? More importantly I really want to know who's display they are comparing my sample to and can I see a photo of that display, its age, so I can compare to mine.

I still have hope that they can work through their process, reports, timeliness, and presentation layer but in my experience it wouldn't be something I'd recommend.


Besides this we should be careful how we use this data, because often errors occur that lead to critical results, I usually prefer to compare them with some general ones to have a better understanding and generally to know if the results are correct, this I learned in college when I was doing writing using browse this site this was really interesting to learn, especially because it was a simple piece of writing that I had to submit as individual work that I had to do for literature, compare and contrast is a brilliant technique that I already use every time, I have to say that after my observations this has become a good skill, because from now on all my tests are produced in a more natural way and the results are much closer to reality, this makes me very happy. I think that everyone should read this post and in these conditions I hope that our tests will become more realistic.

I agree with you, in fact I wouldn't say that youtube is a truthful or good source, everything there needs to be analyzed and then some conclusions made.

 

[taricha]

Hi @taricha I love these threads. Thank you for what you do. This is a fascinating subject for sure.
Do you have or know of anyone that has a thread, papers or data tracking known hobbyist coral pathogens and antibiotics/medications used to treat them succesfully?
I'd love to see a thread and discussion this subject.

These quotes below are the extent of the info that I have run across.

It seems like right now is a particularly significant time for progress in treating the diseases of coral.
Sprung and Delbeek in [April '23] talked about forthcoming published results on this front.
Mike Paletta just wrote up this article as well in ReefBuilders.
And Aquabiomics work on brown jelly disease written up a couple of years ago.

(all of these 3 I mentioned seem to be talking about using similar antibiotics against a range of diseases in a few different kinds of corals.)

And I'll add one more....

Apparently, the same arcobacter species that is the central character of this thread is also a likely cause behind Brown Jelly in goniopora, and RTN in millepora. Would not have guessed that these diseases in these different corals are the same disease - but it seems at least likely that they can all be caused by the exact same pathogen. See vid below.

Dr. Eli Meyer from AquaBiomics and Dr. Andrew Bouwma (29:30 - 31:45 in video)

Dr. Bouwma also mentions that another antibiotic may be more sensible choice as it acts like cipro, but is not a human-use antibiotic.

On the other side of the coin, there is a research group in the Caribbean that is using a probiotic paste to treat infected stony corals in the wild - somewhat successfully.
https://www.ushijima-lab.com/

I've heard microbiological people describe fight against captive coral disease as two pronged: antibiotics and probiotics. I look forward to when the probiotic side is a viable choice in the hobby. It's lagging a bit behind the antibiotic side, but seems to be moving forward.

 

[taricha]

More importantly I really want to know who's display they are comparing my sample to and can I see a photo of that display, its age, so I can compare to mine.

This is not entirely unknowable. There have been a number of people on this site with fantastic systems who have done aquabiomics reports and shared them.
And a few others around elsewhere (youtube). I haven't seen anything in looking at those that would support this concern - that the database "average" might be some sort of undesirable average.

 

[taricha]

The bacterial biodiversity narrative is another flavor of the month explanation for a successful aquarium. I for one have under appreciated their role in the aquarium but they are not the microscopic gods of good luck.

Perhaps the only / most signifiant thing I would point to in terms of explanatory power of the microbiome results is that experienced reefers have for years said that tanks take really long times to hit their stride. And that a coral system will be better at 6 months than at 6 weeks. And it's not just the learning curve of the aquarist. Experienced aquarists will tell you that even if they set up new tank after new tank, this process is still long and slow whether it's their 2nd tank or 10th.
The microbiome results tell us that yes, a reef tank at 6 months is measurably different from (and more stable than) one at 6 weeks.
This is interesting because chemical / ICP / other analytical techniques have a really hard time generating something measurable that could tell you a 6 week old system is less mature than a 6 month old one.

As far as everything else about these microbiomes looking good or bad - the correlations only seem to work backwards: The tank has some issue -> microbiome reflects the disturbance. The tank is stable and healthy -> microbiome reflects this desirable state. I can't point to a single instance of it running the other way: desirable microbiome causing the tank to be stable, or a disturbed microbiome being the cause of a tank issue. Pathogen detection is the only thing that comes close to that sort of direction of cause from microbiome to observable tank state. So as usual, in the end I wind up very close to your skeptical perspective.

 

[areefer01]

This is not entirely unknowable. There have been a number of people on this site with fantastic systems who have done aquabiomics reports and shared them.
And a few others around elsewhere (youtube). I haven't seen anything in looking at those that would support this concern - that the database "average" might be some sort of undesirable average.

I was just wondering if the data is a sliding scale or changes over time based on the samples or their criteria they use. I'm not sure if this is a 1 month old display or a year, five years, ten years, or more. And who is to say it is even correct.

Or if I understand your response correctly it is an average from their data. In either case thanks Apologies if my question/comment wasn't properly asked as now that I think about it it wasn't to me.

Hope your day is going well.

 

[LRT]

These quotes below are the extent of the info that I have run across.


And I'll add one more....


On the other side of the coin, there is a research group in the Caribbean that is using a probiotic paste to treat infected stony corals in the wild - somewhat successfully.
https://www.ushijima-lab.com/

I've heard microbiological people describe fight against captive coral disease as two pronged: antibiotics and probiotics. I look forward to when the probiotic side is a viable choice in the hobby. It's lagging a bit behind the antibiotic side, but seems to be moving forward.

Thank you for this post Absoloute treasure trove of information here. Extremely fascinating and interesting stuff. I cannot wait until the findings from the reefbums episode are published. Very cool!

 

[Jimbo327]

So does the AF Life Source pass your BS Filter? I ordered some, and want to know if this is just snake oil or a cheap biodiversity multiplier. My tank is coming up on 6 months, and it started with dead rock and dry sand. There are lots of corals I purchased, other reefer's rubble, and coralline is just started. I have added multiple type of bottled bacteria as well.