Can nitrifying bacteria survive changes in specific gravity?

Leaellynasaura

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The first fish I plan to get and put in my quarantine tank are going to be mollies. I plan to start the salinity at 1.005 or so and work up to 1.025 over a few days. If I take filter media from another cycled quarantine tank and put it in the new one. Will the change in salinity kill the bacteria?
 

Brew12

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The first fish I plan to get and put in my quarantine tank are going to be mollies. I plan to start the salinity at 1.005 or so and work up to 1.025 over a few days. If I take filter media from another cycled quarantine tank and put it in the new one. Will the change in salinity kill the bacteria?
Bacteria are very hardy. They should be just fine.
 
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Leaellynasaura

Leaellynasaura

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I just found this:

Salinity
Freshwater nitrifying bacteria will grow in salinities ranging between 0 to 6 ppt (parts per thousand) (specific gravity between 1.0000-1.0038).

Saltwater nitrifying bacteria will grow in salinities ranging from 6 up to 44 ppt. (specific gravity between 1.0038-1.0329).

Adaptation to different salinities may involve a lag time of 1-3 days before exponential growth begins.

It looks like it should be fine.
 

brandon429

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great thread, linked to our cycling thread where we talk about bacterial strength abilities
 

mcarroll

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I just found this:

Salinity
Freshwater nitrifying bacteria will grow in salinities ranging between 0 to 6 ppt (parts per thousand) (specific gravity between 1.0000-1.0038).

Saltwater nitrifying bacteria will grow in salinities ranging from 6 up to 44 ppt. (specific gravity between 1.0038-1.0329).

Adaptation to different salinities may involve a lag time of 1-3 days before exponential growth begins.

It looks like it should be fine.

Definitely an interesting topic!

A long time ago I lost an article where the author said something completely awesome like:
"Salinity is the number one determinant of microbial community makeup"

(If I can find the article again I will definitely post it.)

Interesting that my salinity crept up to about 1.030 before my adventure with dino's/chrysophytes/cyano/etc began...I suspected that might have been a factor in those blooms, but I knew it wasn't the only factor.

1.030 is pretty close to their upper tolerance – my nitrifying bacteria may have been going through some serious transitions before I got things corrected :eek:!

Post #327 on the KNO3 thread is one place I mentioned it.
 

beaslbob

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That should work but is time consuming.

What I would do instead is start with full marine tank, add macro algae (in a refugium even a simple in tank), wait a week, then add the male molly and don't feed the next week. Start feeding 1 flake per day the thrid week. Once the molly has lived a few weeks you should be ready for the any quarantined fish.

Still that's just me and my .02
 

Daniel@R2R

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Honestly, IME mollies are fine with the salinity shock. Being a "brackish" fish, they're accustomed to shifts in salinity. In the wild, they actually range from fully freshwater to full saltwater. In my research, it seemed that there wasn't any real difference in people's experiences of putting them into a tank after floating them vs. slow acclimation... The ones that seemed to struggle battled more with the flow of the reef tank than anything else. I'd recommend just putting them in with your target salinity already set.
 
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ReefQueen

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I have actually had greater success with acclimating mollies quickly. Like within an hour or 2. I've even just tossed a molly straight into saltwater with no signs of stress. So slowly raising your salinity isn't necessary IME
 

brandon429

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agreed they're bulletproof. I wonder if their ich is able to transmit into marine systems though? not sure how ich works in varying saline environs

in our cycling thread as of a couple years now we list only three conditions which will kill off tank bacteria to the point you can measure the loss with an accurate ammonia test kit (where after event X, the water is changed and the substrates in question can no longer oxidize 1 ppm ammonia in 24 hours):
-true drying, verified drying of all surfaces internal and external on a given substrate can kill nitrifiers who are housed alongside non nitrifiers in insulating scums;
-obvious medication events, that directly target gram neg bac or general bac communities through some mechanism
-temp extremes so severe and sustained an aquarium is never likely to see them. no heater malfunction that kills a whole tank of coral will kill off the nitrifiers. it takes something bigtime, and sustained. Dieoff from a heater malfunction will increase tank nitrifiers due to a huge temp new food source of rot from dying organisms who had tighter temp requirements than our bac, and because that temp spike will still be within the temp-influenced reproduction activity for general aerobic bac who just got lots of rare food input.

we never did list changes in salinity as a sterilizing agent this thread was a neat confirmation with that little info snippet above.
 

anthonys51

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I had 4 mollies, i basically added the bags water and mollies to a bucket, added twice as much water waited 10 mins and added the whole bucket to my tank. So really no need to accumulate mollies slowly.
 

Brew12

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I wonder if their ich is able to transmit into marine systems though? not sure how ich works in varying saline environs
Fresh water ich (Ichthyophthirius multifiliis) will not survive in a marine environment. Marine ich is a completely different parasite called Cryptocaryon Irritans. The only reason it is called ich is because it looks like its fresh water counterpart and has very similar life cycles. Marine ich can survive low levels of salinity relative to sea water but it cannot survive in fresh water.
 

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