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Yes, our last exchange got me thinking.Hi Dan!
When you wrote “chronic infection”, what did you mean? If you got the idea from my post my curious to know
Without any research on the subject, I though the mat building Cyanobacteria were present in most tanks, but only “bloom” and become mats under certain circumstances.
The chronic infection idea I want to explore is a single species of cyanobacteria that dominates the microbiome. Because it is a dominant member, small changes to an aquarium allow it it overgrow the aquarium. On the other hand, if a cyanobacteria does not dominate the microbiome, it cannot easily bloom. The idea does not resolve the debate of what starts the bloom as much as why does the bloom occur so easily or frequently.
I assume every aquarium has cyanobacteria. I also assume as does @taricha, there is a small number of species that cause all our problems. I was thinking recently, that because the aquarium trade is one big happy family of traders and vendors, the cyanobacteria infection is being passed around quite readily, somewhat like a popular virus is currently doing these days. Maybe the gut microbiome is a better analogy. Disease causing microorganisms can dominate a microbiome and cause illness when the gut microbiome diversity is diminished. The C. difficile infection is a good example.
I would need to obtain a price break from @AquaBiomics to be able to survey enough systems and to run experiments to see if there is any merit in this idea.