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

danielankeny

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Definitely correct. Need much larger sample sizes to draw definite conclusions
But anecdotal “studies” are the best we can probably ever hope for, and the studies can highlight trends that might suggest which methods are more likely successful than others
 
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taricha

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I started my reef tank based on this series.
Did you use one of their model methods for the start material? Which? nice tank, btw.

It is an interesting finding, but as someone previously mentioned, still anecdotal, albeit a good anecdote.
Right, the main ideas I want to pull from it are not conclusions about any one tank or start method. I think there's a lot of things we can get from the data that are more general - of the form "all the tanks subject to this effect, followed this path." Those are much more interesting to me than specifically how well a bag of oceandirect live sand did, etc.

Sorry to be obtuse here… but isn’t that purely expected and logical to begin with?
heh, now it makes perfect sense to me too... in hindsight.

Lastly, I don't think this did too much product pushing aside from it made me absolutely purchase from algae barn
I think the case for pods (in the data, and in general hobby experience) is a little narrower than Ryan makes it out to be, but I'll leave that for later.

it is interesting and not particularly surprising that tanks tend toward the same microbes over time...
good succinct summary of this idea.
 
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Court_Appointed_Hypeman

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I started my reef tank based on this series. I started my first reef tank July of last year and have documented the tank on my YouTube channel I don't talk but uploaded video from start until now. It really helped me. I didn't have a real bad ugly faze and it was My first salt water tank
I also started my tank because of this series, or the precursor video.

I was doing water changes on our fresh, while youtube auto played into Randy's talk, before the talk finished, my wife already found me a used 75g fowlr with sump. I was absolutely enthralled with the thought of micro crustaceans and making a little ecosystem that would require more thought that how easy our fresh tamks were.

So, when talking about BRS and their contributions, I am absolutely biased.
 

Cichlid Dad

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Did you use one of their model methods for the start material? Which? nice tank, btw.


Right, the main ideas I want to pull from it are not conclusions about any one tank or start method. I think there's a lot of things we can get from the data that are more general - of the form "all the tanks subject to this effect, followed this path." Those are much more interesting to me than specifically how well a bag of Caribsea live sand did, etc.


heh, now it makes perfect sense to me too... in hindsight.


I think the case for pods (in the data, and in general hobby experience) is a little narrower than Ryan makes it out to be, but I'll leave that for later.


good succinct summary of this idea.
Thank you, I took the info and being on a budget (wife) I started with Marco dry rock, 40 pounds of Fiji live sand, 40 pounds of ocean direct. Then added turbo start. Then One live rock from a tank tear down that was simi dark for months, just ambient light, and a live rock from Petco full of coralline algae. Put in a clown added pods from algae barn. Full light from day one.
 

Cichlid Dad

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I also started my tank because of this series, or the precursor video.

I was doing water changes on our fresh, while youtube auto played into Randy's talk, before the talk finished, my wife already found me a used 75g fowlr with sump. I was absolutely enthralled with the thought of micro crustaceans and making a little ecosystem that would require more thought that how easy our fresh tamks were.

So, when talking about BRS and their contributions, I am absolutely biased.
I agree, my tank speak for itself. All brs inspired down to the t5 lights
 

rtparty

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I also started my tank because of this series, or the precursor video.

I was doing water changes on our fresh, while youtube auto played into Randy's talk, before the talk finished, my wife already found me a used 75g fowlr with sump. I was absolutely enthralled with the thought of micro crustaceans and making a little ecosystem that would require more thought that how easy our fresh tamks were.

So, when talking about BRS and their contributions, I am absolutely biased.

Ryan gave the talk. Randy isn’t with BRS any longer ;)
 
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taricha

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I am not sure we actually care about diversity, we may care more about dominant strains.
This is a pretty good hypothesis. It holds up fairly well with all the data on the BRS set of tanks.
 

GlassMunky

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Numbers aren’t going to line up perfectly but one isn’t going to read 450ppm calcium and the other reads 325ppm calcium. Well, I can think of one of the ICP companies where this may happen but the better companies will almost always be close enough for our use


Over 40 ICP tests with ATI and I test the big three at the same time of collection. I can’t think of one test where ATI results were totally off base from mine.

The trick is avoiding the crappy companies ;)
Problem is, this is exactly what happens with AB testing.
COMPLETELY different result, not even similar.
This genetic testing that they do is highly flawed in both methodology and testing capabilities.
 

Aqua Man

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805A704B-63AA-4767-82B7-F261C1CE3784.jpeg

Pods rule!! The panes were covered in algae until I added some live rock and pods.
C87FA173-B429-4B56-BAE8-920044CCFF4F.jpeg


Everything we put in our tank has the potential to bring a hitchhiker we don’t want. I’ve even heard that snail and fish feces can carry algae spores!!

I have never cleaned the glass on this 20gl tank yet. Been wet for 5 months. Some ugly but not to much.
31450FD0-AE92-4AAB-A8E6-175E6B2464AC.jpeg
The Reef Palooza talk is good also. How 15 answers changed the way I look at my tank.
 
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taricha

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Extracted Data and Idea 2a:
The Diversity (numbers of bacteria types detected) followed a tightly similar pattern in all the systems. The pattern seems driven by light and time. Initial dark period lowered the diversity, which stabilized later under medium light, and rose essentially across the board under high light. This means in some sense, it's probably marking photosynthetic activity.
[edit: actually it did the same in a tank with no lighting changes. oops!]

Idea 2b:
The balance score on the other hand, was not a universally shared trend tied to light and time - but instead could be correlated to the state of play in the system. The four lowest final balance score tanks were 4 of the least attractive/desirable at that phase (week 15) as judged by visible nuisance.

From the above videos, I pulled the raw aquabiomics scores for each of the 12 tanks at each time point: 2, 4, 10 and 15 weeks.
First chart is the Diversity scores (the raw number of types detected.)
Tank Diversity Numbers.png

Notice how the diversity drops across the board during the early dark phase, while the reverse happens in the early dark phase to the tanks' balance scores below.

These are the Balance scores - a.k.a similarity to core microbiome of Reef Tanks ( again raw scores, not percentiles)
Tank Balance Scores.png


Note how nearly universal the early dark phase increase in balance score is. After that, it's much more likely a reflection of what's actually happening in that specific tank.

You can tie the four lowest final (week 15) Balance scores to 4 tanks who had some of the worst nuisance issues at the time of that test.
Biobrick: green algae everywhere
Gulf Wet Rock: so many nuisances on every surface
TankWater: light colored filamentous algae/chrysophyte on all rock
Coral: red flatworms dominating the rock.
Tank Snapshots Week15.png


Low balance alone doesn't catch all the ugly looking ones: The system started with tank sand got relatively high scores on both diversity and balance, but was a mess of dark diatoms and a little hair algae.

Still the balance score is at least somewhat indicative of the state of play. The diversity metric seems to tell us nothing about the state of the tank health regarding uglies at test time. The four lowest diversity tanks are a mix of the worst and the best looking systems. Similarly the highest diversity tank also was one of the worst in terms of nuisances.
The diversity may tell us something predictive later in the tests - but right now it isn't a useful marker.
 
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jabberwock

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Wow, there is a lot going on with this thread. I am not a reef expert, but I am a scientist. BRS does a pretty good job with information, but not really with science. In the last 5 years the entire hobby has changed and BRS has reported on this. I respect their informational efforts. I have learned from them. I respect the capitalistic endeavor. I do not LIVE UNDER capitalism, I thrive in it, and I am glad that BRS does too. It is a good thing.

The fact is that there are way too many variables in a bazillion different systems of application to really have any kind of scientific approach to the "biodiversity" question in the aquarium industry. AKA, your milage may vary.

And by the way, bazillion is not a scientific term...
 

CoastalTownLayabout

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It’s been a while since I watched the eps but in addition to the lighting intensity changes wasn’t there an additional disturbance prior to the switch to SPS lighting? General clean, sand vac or something?
 

Paul B

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Mature reefs have lower diversity, apparently.
Aquabionetics, also told my reef at the time had less biodiversity than most tanks. And my tank was over 45 years old at the time.
 
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PensacolaReefKeeper

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All good experiments are repeatable. All valuable experiments give us information that we can use in our life to accomplish a desired end. Love the exploration, but we're missing these two key things here that would make this so much better! They should have done maybe 12 experiments with 4 set ups repeated in triplicate and then they should have told us somethingggggg for the majority of hobbyists who have established systems--like how to increase balance in a practical way if the findings suggested that was important to maintaining an attractive display tank.
 
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taricha

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I goofed on this. It's surprisingly (to me) wrong.

Extracted Data and Idea 2a:
The Diversity (numbers of bacteria types detected) followed a tightly similar pattern in all the systems. The pattern seems driven by light and time. Initial dark period lowered the diversity, which stabilized later under medium light, and rose essentially across the board under high light. This means in some sense, it's probably marking photosynthetic activity.
I was thinking about how to separate the ideas of lighting changes (1-4 weeks dark, 5-10 weeks med light, 11-15 weeks high light) vs just the passage of time... and then I remembered one tank didn't get the lighting change, because it had LPS corals in it - so it was medium light the whole time.

So if the lighting is controlling (or heavily influencing) the diversity trend, then that tank should look different than the others that went through the lighting changes and....
Nothing. Essentially exactly the same trend as the others with the lighting changes.
Coral Tank Light.png

The coral tank is shown with orange stars.
So this trend shared by all the tanks seems to be just the effect of maturation with time in the first 3 months of these new tanks and happened even in a tank that had no lighting changes at all.
 

rtparty

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@taricha could it be that the bacteria just needs light and intensity doesn’t play a big factor? For example, maybe it just needs 50 PAR and after that it’s all equal?

Just throwing that out there as I have no clue
 
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taricha

taricha

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@taricha could it be that the bacteria just needs light and intensity doesn’t play a big factor? For example, maybe it just needs 50 PAR and after that it’s all equal?
Almost all of the strains represented by the diversity score don't need light at all. But they often do live in association with photosynthetic organisms that do use light. That was my reasoning for thinking the High light was driving the diversity increase, because photosynthetic organisms become producers of organic carbon when you turn the lights up. And the organic carbon fuels many types of bacteria. That was my chain of logic, but it turns out that you get exactly the same u-shaped diversity trend with no lighting changes and simply the passage of time in the first 3 months of the tank.
 
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