U
User1
Guest
Oh poor Lasse, this has now run its course. As I'm getting tired of this and so I take no pride in embarrassing you, but I tried over the last few days to enlighten you on how science actually works. I waited patiently for you to say, I don’t know because I can't possibly know without any evidence.
But now you respond with another little witticism to draw people to your side. (Oh that's our funny Lasse!) Well this pseudoscientific crap will not play here anymore. I will lay the smack down on all your theories (actually they’re hypotheticals and poor ones indeed). This is sciences house now.
So I know people might be rolling their eyes at this, and feel I’m attacking Lasse. Think for a second what you would tell me if I told you that you can cure COVID in most people with hamburger meat? That is much stronger than this hydrogen sulfide hypothesis. To take up that COVID analogy a bit more, if I said well almost everyone who ate hamburger meat survived COVID you would absolutely role your eyes at me. Yet when things take on big words it gets a lot harder. But all you have to realize is that cyanobacterial mats have formed at pretty much all nitrate levels in both freshwater and saltwater aquariums (barring a true zero). And so the hypothesis of adding nitrate to fix a cyano problem is immediately falsified. ( Basically if you dose nitrates to 5 mg/L you know that cyanobacterial mats have formed at this level, so it's gone) And so you would need to select an alternate hypothesis to test, one possible example would be that aquarists take better care of their tanks when they dose nitrate. The hamburger one is actually harder to refute then the nitrate one. Go ahead prove me wrong
You might ask why that’s a problem as people can believe what they want to. It’s because reefing already has enough troubles with the shady companies, the pseudoscience and all the trade secret garbage. If this hobby is going to move forward all the pseudoscientific crap has to go. It needs to be based on reality. On actual things. If hobbyists get to the point where they realize they have been constantly lied to or snookered they will stop in this hobby and it will crash. No matter how well intentioned the information provider is.
Let's see what could happen if this hypothesis grows...
So let's say a twenty year old very popular R2R member who knows everything (lol) find Lasse’s hypothesis and says, hmmm that sounds really cool and scientific. Then since he's taking chemistry at school he does a cursory look up if the topic and discovered that it is actually nitrite produced by DNRA microbes (they take nitrate and convert it to ammonia but they leak nitrites in the process) that blocks sulfate reducing bacteria’s ability to produce hydrogen sulfide. (Yes again not nitrate.) Obviously they would get super excited at their new found cutting edge knowledge and would start dosing nitrite. Now as I already discussed that when one is taking extra steps to take care of their aquarium while there is a pest outbreak it will automatically improve the odds and so chances are he gets rid of his cyano mats eventually. As a popular member he hits the forums triumphantly and telld everyone, HEY DOSE NITRITE FOR CYANOS!! And so now using big words and his popularity he recruits a lot of people to this methodology. And so as usual per this hobby it would be successful because of the extra attention but of course never close to one hundred percent effective. He'd be looked at in the forums with awe, that person really knows his stuff, a forum hero! Challengers using logic will be roasted and will quit the forum. The people who it didn’t work for will be told they did it wrong, to tweak the dose higher, to tweak the dose lower, or that it was really phosphate in their case, or they just don’t plain understand it. So it would become a thing in the hobby for a bunch of years until the fad would finally fade away, and during this period we'd lose a bunch of people because of uncontrolled cyano mats and nitrite harassment and reefing would have gone completely backwards on the cyano question.
So that's how serious this can become and if you couldn't guess this has already happened in various ways many many times over in this hobby.
So unfortunately now I have to look like the bad guy cleaning up all these stinky messes dropped into the forums. People will become wary of me, they'll say “who’s that newbie, Lasse knows so much!, he is a real good person, and so so helpful". Well I don't doubt that he is a good person and helpful, however he is seriously misinforming the community while cloaking everything in science speak and doing the community an overall disservice.
And as the so called scientist bad guy people eventually become afraid to communicate with me. They see posts like these and feel I’ll tell them they’re stupid. Or that I’m a know it all who will push only their way (see the last paragraph of this rebuke) No! If anyone wants to reach out and discuss their hypotheses I more than welcome it. We can discuss possible hypotheses to address your question, how to look in the literature, how to design an experiment, analyze the data etc. For instance someone may now want to explore growing ciliates or rotifers for cyano biocontrol. WONDERFUL. Maybe they’ll work, maybe they’ll be iffy, or maybe they'll be a dismal failure. However it will be grounded in known science and not science fiction.
Oh and fair warning if anybody reaches out or posts something telling me or the forum how something absolutely works, well you best back it up. Which brings me to this.
Lasse if you keep peddling this pseudoscientific garbage I’m going to keep thrashing you until you realize you have no freaking clue. I however will not respond directly to you again until you hit the books, run hypotheses by people, consider alternatives, don’t talk in absolutes and finally say I DO NOT KNOW HOW IT WORKS, but it works for me.
Oh and as far as the nitrate/cyano question. I really do not know the answer. I’ve presented a few ideas, but I DON’t KNOW...So why is that freaking so hard? In the forum you'll see me argue my position however you'll never see me say you must do this to achieve this unless it's seriously grounded. (E.g. add calcium to raise calcium) There's so many variations on reefing that work, I'll definitely discuss how I think they work based on my own knowledge. I'm also here to stretch the envelope and will probably do funky things to my tank. Yet I'm not infallible and will really admit when I get something wrong, but rest assured that my hypotheses will be based on something that has already been observed and not wishful thinking.
Oh and I mean I’ve got twenty plus years in microbiology and genetics and I say I don’t know all the time. That’s the freaking point! If I am interested enough then I can say, I don’t know, let me look in the literature, make sure I understand the literature and then decide on a reasonable hypothesis, then test the hypothesis utilizing the proper controls, then confirm, deny or rework the hypothesis. Repeat this until a hypothesis is confirmed by probability. Then going broader you must have someone completely different test the hypothesis and see if they have the same result. Repeat this a thousand or so times with all confirming the original hypothesis and now you’ll finally arrive at a scientific theory. (which still might be challenged in the future with the creation of new tests and new instrumentation, haha!!!)
For lurkers and forum members be safe out there and don’t believe everything you read, and that includes believing me! (basically do your homework and place trust when it has been earned, and remove trust when it’s been broken)
Sorry for the long post... I'm just already so tired
A bit over the top and also a bit of bad bed side manners while also coming in at a volume of 10. Probably could have dialed it down. Way down. I think you could have saved angst by just saying enough and be done. There comes a time in any debate or conversation when you realize that neither party is going to convince the other to consider something different.
Hope you get some rest and have a good rest of the day.
