Victoria Music's Custom 180 Rebuild

[User1]

@Katrina71

Bacteria in a bottle, Myth or Fact

Call me old school, back in the day we placed a deli shrimp in a tank to kick start the cycle. When tank reached 1.5-2 ppm ammonia we pulled it out and waited sometimes weeks to months for bacteria to colonize and drop ammonia and nitrites down to 0 to make tank safe for livestock. With recent...

www.reef2reef.com

There is a lot of nonsense back and forth...as per usually in these threads at times. I am sure Dr. Reef would be happy to share a brief synopsis. I do wonder if he ever wrote an article outlining his findings I know there was another thread using some monitor for an additional study.

There is a lot of nonsense for sure but if it helps any here is what I know using both old school and Dr. Tim's one and only. Both work but at different a different pace. Old school and more traditional way of using food or a piece of shrimp my 100 gallon took about 90 days give or take to process ammonia to 0 in under 24 hours. I wish I documented at what stage I introduced a fish (chromis) but I do recall I was following Moe's Marine Aquarium Handbook: Beginner to Breeder to a Tee. His chart and what I remember my tank doing was almost a match which was part of the fun.

The current tank upgrade from the 40 breeder to the 210 I used Dr. Tim's by dosing ammonia per his instructions and waiting until it was able to process 4 ppm ammonia in under 24 hours which took about 28 days. His instructions suggest sooner but for me it was 28 days. I let the tank run for another month then fired up lights and skimmer and consolidated the two tanks 15 days later.

I think the thread you are referencing also used the Turbo 9000 which worked in under 24 hours. It used Dr. Tim's and the other both of which worked but one faster than the other. I'm not a huge fan of the faster pace stuff and with dry rock, well, it is going to take a year or more to mature anyway so why rush it was my thought. So Dr. Tim's worked for me I guess in the end although I still wish I followed through and saved a bit more to use TBS rock.

Pukani rock is horrible in my opinion.

Edit: Not sure if your post was asking a question or just in passing so no idea why I gave my input....

 

[Victoria M]

@saf1 I lol at the last comment.
It was for katrina I just did not want to keep commenting about it in someone elses thread. Ah forget it...i am gonna post it there too. It is where I was asked about it.

 

[Victoria M]

BTW Saf1 I started using fritz 9 for my QT tanks most of the time. I used to use Seachems Stability most of the time it would keep the ammonia badge in the yellow zone. But that study made me pick up Fritz everytime I see it at a LFS.

 

[User]

BTW Saf1 I started using fritz 9 for my QT tanks most of the time. I used to use Seachems Stability most of the time it would keep the ammonia badge in the yellow zone. But that study made me pick up Fritz everytime I see it at a LFS.

Biospira gives me a 12 hour cycle in the QT tanks. I don’t know why the result in that thread was different.

I soak a typical sponge from a 20g hob in 1/2 small bottle of biospira (in a 1pint gelato container, for what it’s worth), let it sit overnight, then assemble and switch on the filter, in the am. I have the water in the tank heating and aerating with an air stone and the sponge -less hob running overnight. Go get fish (90 minute round trip including browsing time) put them straight in after acclimating.

When I tested the method- I did the overnight soak, then dosed a 10g to 1.5ppm with ammonia. Tested at zero an hour later. Control water volume without filter was 1.5 ppm on the nose.

I’m sure it would work if I dosed and left it did 2-3 hours, but the overnight step is super convenient. If I know I’m going fish shopping tomorrow, I set it all up after dinner and girls are in bed, then I’m good for next day.

Of course, mixing bacterial supplements will only be a benefit since you’re increasing diversity, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to buy up fritz 9, particularly when it’s normally more expensive than biospira

 

[mmw64]

Sounds like an amazing trip and I'm sure you will have a wonderful time. California is a beautiful state. It really is. I don't want to get too much into politics here probably because I would offend many here. However, what you said about San Francisco is also true for Los Angeles and both issues start with the City Council. California is politically inept and with this go around it is only going to get worse.

Certain areas you can still visit in San Fran that would be enjoyable so if you have the time it could be worth it.

Agree, from a CA native!

 

[Victoria M]

Biospira gives me a 12 hour cycle in the QT tanks. I don’t know why the result in that thread was different.

I soak a typical sponge from a 20g hob in 1/2 small bottle of biospira (in a 1pint gelato container, for what it’s worth), let it sit overnight, then assemble and switch on the filter, in the am. I have the water in the tank heating and aerating with an air stone and the sponge -less hob running overnight. Go get fish (90 minute round trip including browsing time) put them straight in after acclimating.

When I tested the method- I did the overnight soak, then dosed a 10g to 1.5ppm with ammonia. Tested at zero an hour later. Control water volume without filter was 1.5 ppm on the nose.

I’m sure it would work if I dosed and left it did 2-3 hours, but the overnight step is super convenient. If I know I’m going fish shopping tomorrow, I set it all up after dinner and girls are in bed, then I’m good for next day.

Of course, mixing bacterial supplements will only be a benefit since you’re increasing diversity, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to buy up fritz 9, particularly when it’s normally more expensive than biospira

Biospira was not working for me back in the early days of QT. And was not easy to pick up unless the local Petco had it. Then I found Stability. I have been a big fan of Stability since then. But have had several bottles not perform. I chalk it up to bad handling, bacteria died for whatever reason, not a good batch from the bottling plant, who knows...But as far as the Fritz. fish stores I like to visit up in MI carry Fritz products so it is something I will get when I can, support these LFS in someway. especially if I don't buy livestock. I also have Fritz9 or Stability is a good product to have on hand for emergencys like poweroutages.
It is funny you mention that about using different products and increasing diversity could only help. That is the other reason I use both. I secretly figure it helps. And I think I used both in my tank when I started it up.
But some folks in that thread kept saying there was no benefit to using different products together, that one would just die out, outcompeted by other bacteria. I figured that was not likely true, that there would be small niches within the aquarium that different bacteria may do better than others and that their population would wax and wane dependant on the changes in the environment. But what do I know?
I also have never found that a sponge does as well as fluval biomax things, or even the Eheim ones. If I do not have any ready to go from my sump, then I pour a shot glassful of bio-rings, pour Fritz or Stability till covered, and let that sit for a few hours or over night, just whatever. Then pour them into their holder, over the QT water not to waste any. I prefer to use mature media from sump really. I never purposefully did an experiment on them either, just my experience with hospital tanks and QT. Even this current QT with Mr. Foxface, I was struggling with low ammonia once or twice. Bottled bacteria was just getting wiped out by the UV of course. But then I put the sponge filter into the filter. Still showing some ammonia at times. Dang it! So this last transfer I grabbed some bio-rings and voila. All seems good ammonia wise in the kitchen QT.
BTW...I decided to dose GC for MFF due to seeing that touch of redness at his tailbase and because for howmuch this guy eats he should be picking up more weight. With how ill I have been I decided to watch him a little longer and do a round of GC.
I also have not done a separate test for ammonia on this newest QT. just use the badges. My seachem ammonia test gave up the ghost and I have not replaced it.

 

[Victoria M]

It has been so long since I actively started acquiring fish and setting up QT with purpose! I am so excited. And hubby has agreed to build me an additional pretty QT for the kitchen to make TTM easier.

 

[User1]

BTW Saf1 I started using fritz 9 for my QT tanks most of the time. I used to use Seachems Stability most of the time it would keep the ammonia badge in the yellow zone. But that study made me pick up Fritz everytime I see it at a LFS.

That was it - Fritz. I think I cycled the upgrade before that test started but agreed. If I setup another tank, and I may, I'll be sure to use it.

 

[User1]

It has been so long since I actively started acquiring fish and setting up QT with purpose! I am so excited. And hubby has agreed to build me an additional pretty QT for the kitchen to make TTM easier.

See....we MEN also have a super power

 

[Victoria M]

@neilp2006 I just love that you set up a control to determine if bottled bacteria products were the way to go. ;Happy

 

[User]

@neilp2006 I just love that you set up a control to determine if bottled bacteria products were the way to go. ;Happy

Lol, I knew it would work- I’m a microbiologist, so it’s kinda my wheelhouse- but I can’t shake the need for controls when I do an experiment. If you don’t have a comparator, how can you say either way?

You know I quick cycled my 180 with biodpira and turbostart, and documented all the testing levels right? Dosing ammonia, checking levels, redosing. Cycle was complete in like 5 weeks if I remember right.

But some folks in that thread kept saying there was no benefit to using different products together, that one would just die out, outcompeted by other bacteria. I figured that was not likely true, that there would be small niches within the aquarium that different bacteria may do better than others and that their population would wax and wane dependant on the changes in the environment. But what do I know?

Frankly, those folks are wrong, and your intuition is right on the money.

Here’s the thing- even a bottle of fritz 9 has a bacterial blend. Of those present, not all of them are going to colonize, and some will do better under rocks in partial anaerobic conditions, others will like the upper substrate, others all over the rocks. And yes- youre absolutely correct- these populations are highly fluid, and change extensively week to week.

My point is fritz 9 won’t outcompete biospira- if you mix the bottles and add it, each individual strain will find a niche, or not, and will colonize to an unknown extent which will dynamically change.

And here’s the crazy part- of course, people cycle without adding bacteria. takes months, but there is enough free floating bacteria that they can colonize the tank. That happens even if you add bottled bacteria. They’ll come in, weeks later, and colonize a small area, expand, die back, seed another area... etc. my theory is, if you were to sample the bacterial populations in a bunch of mature tanks, the profiles will be pretty similar. Reason being, all tanks are exposed to these same populations, that take time to establish, but are successful at it. 2 years in, you won’t be able to tell if someone used fritz, stability, biospira or a natural cycle . This of course presumed the substrate is the same type and depth, since you’d get more anaerobes in deeper beds etc.

Anyway, I’m droning on. Got to go catch some z’s- kids start there day at 6 these days

 

[Victoria M]

Lol, I knew it would work- I’m a microbiologist, so it’s kinda my wheelhouse- but I can’t shake the need for controls when I do an experiment. If you don’t have a comparator, how can you say either way?

You know I quick cycled my 180 with biodpira and turbostart, and documented all the testing levels right? Dosing ammonia, checking levels, redosing. Cycle was complete in like 5 weeks if I remember right.




Frankly, those folks are wrong, and your intuition is right on the money.

Here’s the thing- even a bottle of fritz 9 has a bacterial blend. Of those present, not all of them are going to colonize, and some will do better under rocks in partial anaerobic conditions, others will like the upper substrate, others all over the rocks. And yes- youre absolutely correct- these populations are highly fluid, and change extensively week to week.

My point is fritz 9 won’t outcompete biospira- if you mix the bottles and add it, each individual strain will find a niche, or not, and will colonize to an unknown extent which will dynamically change.

And here’s the crazy part- of course, people cycle without adding bacteria. takes months, but there is enough free floating bacteria that they can colonize the tank. That happens even if you add bottled bacteria. They’ll come in, weeks later, and colonize a small area, expand, die back, seed another area... etc. my theory is, if you were to sample the bacterial populations in a bunch of mature tanks, the profiles will be pretty similar. Reason being, all tanks are exposed to these same populations, that take time to establish, but are successful at it. 2 years in, you won’t be able to tell if someone used fritz, stability, biospira or a natural cycle . This of course presumed the substrate is the same type and depth, since you’d get more anaerobes in deeper beds etc.

Anyway, I’m droning on. Got to go catch some z’s- kids start there day at 6 these days

Yes, I probably need to refresh my memory abour your tanks early days. I am having a hard time recalling my current tanks early days. ;Bucktooth Winter reading!
And let me really laugh out loud. ;WootI lived the days before we cycled aquariums with bottled bacteria. It took me many months to cycle my aquarium. I had real LR and real LS but it still took a long time. Oh, and it took me a few months to realise the that the 2 LFS that was selling me **** to put in my aquarium were both FOS. I had to learn it all the hard way and email WWM for advise. At that time I was pretty well versed in freshwater, and understood tank cycling, AND I had been reading about saltwater stuff in Tropical Fish Hobbyist. I WAS GONNA BE AN EXPERT...LOL
I was being told very different things at stores than I was reading in books and magazines. I was skeptical but what did I know? So I believed the LR I bought was fully cycled and full of enough bacteria to process the ammonia. “They would never lie to me” Bob Fenner and the gang helped me to trust my own judgement..the facts were before me. My “LR” was still dying and self cleaning. Decaying in my living room, more like it. The smell was not a pretty ocean smell.
I have had a 75 gallon, a 90 gallon and a 188 gallon. I have had a saltwater tank since 2006. Still something new to learn almost every single day. Love this hobby for that reason. I am rambling now. So I will end with
thank you for the compliment and vote of confidence.

 

[NY_Caveman]

Lol, I knew it would work- I’m a microbiologist, so it’s kinda my wheelhouse- but I can’t shake the need for controls when I do an experiment. If you don’t have a comparator, how can you say either way?

You know I quick cycled my 180 with biodpira and turbostart, and documented all the testing levels right? Dosing ammonia, checking levels, redosing. Cycle was complete in like 5 weeks if I remember right.




Frankly, those folks are wrong, and your intuition is right on the money.

Here’s the thing- even a bottle of fritz 9 has a bacterial blend. Of those present, not all of them are going to colonize, and some will do better under rocks in partial anaerobic conditions, others will like the upper substrate, others all over the rocks. And yes- youre absolutely correct- these populations are highly fluid, and change extensively week to week.

My point is fritz 9 won’t outcompete biospira- if you mix the bottles and add it, each individual strain will find a niche, or not, and will colonize to an unknown extent which will dynamically change.

And here’s the crazy part- of course, people cycle without adding bacteria. takes months, but there is enough free floating bacteria that they can colonize the tank. That happens even if you add bottled bacteria. They’ll come in, weeks later, and colonize a small area, expand, die back, seed another area... etc. my theory is, if you were to sample the bacterial populations in a bunch of mature tanks, the profiles will be pretty similar. Reason being, all tanks are exposed to these same populations, that take time to establish, but are successful at it. 2 years in, you won’t be able to tell if someone used fritz, stability, biospira or a natural cycle . This of course presumed the substrate is the same type and depth, since you’d get more anaerobes in deeper beds etc.

Anyway, I’m droning on. Got to go catch some z’s- kids start there day at 6 these days

This sounds like what https://aquabiomics.com/ is doing. If you are interested Neil, I was asked to try it and I will keep you informed.

 

[User]

This sounds like what https://aquabiomics.com/ is doing. If you are interested Neil, I was asked to try it and I will keep you informed.

hmm, interesting concept, but without sampling 2-3 dozen individual areas of the tank, whatever data they get will be incomplete. A huge majority of the bacteria are in biofilms on the substrate and not in the actual water column.

Additionally, I wouldn’t use any of the data to inform remedial dosing of new strains, since, I might be wrong here, we don’t actually know what a ‘good’ community vs a suboptimal one looks like .

I might fire off a few emails when I have some down time. Would be interesting to understand their rationale and sampling methods .

And if I did use the service, you’ve got to know by now I’d be buying up bottles of bacteria and doing QC spiking to check accuracy. You need ‘known knowns’ to be able to trust the ‘known unknowns’

 

[NY_Caveman]

That’s kinda cool.

I’m not sure what

hmm, interesting concept, but without sampling 2-3 dozen individual areas of the tank, whatever data they get will be incomplete. A huge majority of the bacteria are in biofilms on the substrate and not in the actual water column.

Additionally, I wouldn’t use any of the data to inform remedial dosing of new strains, since, I might be wrong here, we don’t actually know what a ‘good’ community vs a suboptimal one looks like .

I might fire off a few emails when I have some down time. Would be interesting to understand their rationale and sampling methods .

And if I did use the service, you’ve got to know by now I’d be buying up bottles of bacteria and doing QC spiking to check accuracy. You need ‘known knowns’ to be able to trust the ‘known unknowns’

I agree and I am interested to see what the sampling method actually is. It involves a glove, so I am not sure it is purely a water column sample (which would not seem that useful to me). I kind of just accepted it blindly without much research because it seemed so interesting.

 

[User]

I agree and I am interested to see what the sampling method actually is. It involves a glove, so I am not sure it is purely a water column sample (which would not seem that useful to me). I kind of just accepted it blindly without much research because it seemed so interesting.

Thing is, if they are using up to date next generation sequencing (which is the only way to do this) you need to use the glove even if you are taking just a water sample. The bacterial population in the water column is so low that a finger tip contamination in the water as you draw up the sample will be enough to swamp out the reads.

These technologies can detect one bacterial cell in as much as 5 liters of water- an insane level of sensitivity.

The other side of the coin is the data analysis. To successfully annotate the genes that are found, and to attribute them to a source bacterium, that strain needs to have been sequenced at some point and entered into a database. Our current estimate is that we have sequenced maybe 9-12% of bacterial strains, at least partially. It’s not uncommon for these types of analyses to give data in which only 15% of the reads can be attributed to the species level. That’s an 85% rate of unsuccessful identification. So while the premise is cool, the real world use is very difficult to parse and almost useless in terms of diagnosing an issue. Unless of course you have Dino’s, or Cyanobacteria, since they’ll be dominant. But interestingly, it’s an almost guaranteed fact that EVERY tank has a population of both these organisms. It’s just small and waiting for the right environmental conditions to occur. If that wasn’t true, neither of those organisms would be as ubiquitously present as they are now. If they weren’t ubiquitous, We wouldn’t have hundreds of threads asking how to get rid of them.

 

[Victoria M]

Update regarding the REEF POWER RP-M
I decided to contact Reef Breeders about the noise. They immediately sent me a new impeller. I changed them out last night. To my delight it is totally silent. I have heard they take excellent care of their customers, but wow! I am impressed. I will update how the pump performs over time with this new impeller.

 

[Victoria M]

I am also getting quite a bit of hair algae in crooks and crannies. It looks like little green trolls are hiding in there. I hope MR.FOXFACE helps with this.

 

[Victoria M]

I also felt well enough to do some water testing.
Skimmer will be back on line this week.
Phos 50ppb
Nitrate 50ppm
dKH 9.6
Mg 1170
I always struggle with Mg. I run kalk in my ATO
I will have to start dosing it again I suppose.

 

[Victoria M]

After Talking to @Brew12 about grounding probes and my shocking incidents in the tank over the last year, I finally ordered a grounding probe from amazon. I will test my skimmer pump tomorrow.