What would a scientist do?
Maybe just cycling an old rock collection in a barrel in the garage, actually for months. Get drinking heavy for 3 or 12 days? The memory is kind of fuzzy about this story. The barrel had been growing chaeto under a light to remove phosphates for more that a year and the whole system was fairly clean and very stable. After reading the previously mentioned wee little thread, my little nephew emptied into the bucket as the beginning of a highly unscientific enquiry into the impacts of beer whiz into a stable, low nutrient system.
Within a week the stable system was blown up with (what looked like dino's) but no one wanted to dip a slide into the bucket to slap under a scope, so we only know it looked like a dino outbreak for a couple of weeks. Then the hair algae over took parts of the chaeto, followed by slime algae and all that interaction caused a population explosion of tiny starfish that had hitchhiked on the chaeto, and those were mostly replaced by tiny limpets and the hair algae slowly dies and the chaeto never really recovered.
Now the bucket doesn't look pristine as it once did, and it needs to be drained to restart the water quality minus human metabolites before the rock goes anywhere near a reef tank.
Number one observation in a limited reef bucket turned symple pristine system into a toilet. Unpublished data, pers com.
Wow, Great info actually hahaha