Bacteria...let's really start understanding them! part one

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

Short and to the point is that too many chemoorganoheterotrophs will use up all the oxygen in the water. I'll talk more in depth about this as we go.

Too short to be entirely accurate, IMO. Inherent in that statement is the assumption that there is excess organic matter available. The whole premise of organic carbon dosing is that organics are limiting, not the bacteria to consume them.

 

[BeltedCoyote]

Hmm I have run into a conundrum. To keep the pertinent info at the top I need to start a new thread each time. So how can people follow this discussion as I go part to part? I'm thinking the only way is if you all follow a hash tag e.g.

#bacteriarule

Whaddya think?

following as well

 

[brandon429]

Flampton were you referencing chemical oxygen demand and bod in your oxygen use scenario above? I would personally choose to own a bare bottom reef/cleaner than normal reef vs a reef with any sandbed if given advanced warning of extended power outages.

 

[taricha]

Nice!

 

[flampton]

Too short to be entirely accurate, IMO. Inherent in that statement is the assumption that there is excess organic matter available. The whole premise of organic carbon dosing is that organics are limiting, not the bacteria to consume them.

Hi Randy...Definitely agree that available food will determine the overall levels of bacteria. However the question was not how do you end up with too many. The question was on why this scenario would be problematic.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

Hi Randy...Definitely agree that available food will determine the overall levels of bacteria. However the question was not how do you end up with too many. The question was on why this scenario would be problematic.

Perhaps it is a fine distinction, but dumping in a ton of bacteria will not cause low O2. Dumping in a lot of easily metabolized organic will, even perhaps before the bacteria numbers increase all that much.

 

[flampton]

Flampton were you referencing chemical oxygen demand and bod in your oxygen use scenario above? I would personally choose to own a bare bottom reef/cleaner than normal reef vs a reef with any sandbed if given advanced warning of extended power outages.

Well since we're talking about bacteria I'll just talk about BOD.

Okay so biological oxygen demand (BOD) is a rough way of measuring the levels of organics within a system. For aerobic chemoorganoheterotrophs to fully utilize the organic carbon in a system they must use oxygen. If there is a lot of organic matter it will require more O2 to utilize and if there are low amounts it will require less..
So pure water has no BOD i.e. it has no organics. Dirty water has high BOD i.e. lots of organics.

Okay as for your question Brandon... I'm actually not referring to a power outage type situation. I'm just referring to the fact that if your waters BOD is too high your aerobic heterotroph population will expand and as this population expands it will utilize the oxygen available in the system. At a tipping point the oxygen levels will fall too low to support multicellular life.

 

[flampton]

Perhaps it is a fine distinction, but dumping in a ton of bacteria will not cause low O2. Dumping in a lot of easily metabolized organic will, even perhaps before the bacteria numbers increase all that much.

Well actually it will . If you add a ton of carbon from bacteria or any other organic material you will get the same result albeit with a slight shift in time frame.

However I totally get where you're coming from and hope our discussion has cleared up any confusion with the other readers

 

[brandon429]

I wanted to add in here some practical applications for bacteria in our hobby that nobody has documented an answer for

we have lots of answers, just not any definitive testing using tanks or logged readings etc.
The reason I'm posting this is because its amazing in 2020 we know about the dna of our tank bacteria but have not clearly answered these basic questions which drive sales in the hobby bigtime:

1. can a cat litter box next to a reef tank, even a rank one, transmit enough ammonia waft to legit register a spike in a reef next to it, this is the greatest reef mystery naturally we'd start there. Reefcentral alone took years on that one matter in a single thread I recall, and with everybody armed with API readings you know we never got anywhere. Where's the hach nh3 digital meter data for the answer, or a seneye? Nobody knows if litterboxes count as bioload


2. Can you starve a cycle out after establishing one. Can ultimate fallow times kill off a cycle, make it not pass nh3 oxidation tests that cycled tanks can pass? Nearly everyone says yes, fast. But we have so far a 3 year fallow thread to track, it didnt starve

the bacteria fed, without our help, for how long? 20 years if kept hydrated, whats the max? Nobody knows if a cycle can be starved back to not cycled


3. does caribsea wet pack sand show up live, able to pass oxidation testing, or not live, and transmitting bacteria only works in a bottle but not a plastic bag of water? does tap rinsing that sand so its not cloudy remove the cycle, if it was verified there prior? nobody knows if the wet pack sand they buy is truly activated, but it says so on the label. bottle bac says activated liquid inside, and we skip cycles with that stuff to the tune of fifty thousand tanks last year alone, it's certainly active.


4. How long does a marine unassisted cycle take. this is my own big question. We know that cycle charts online are from eighty years or so ago

before bottle bac, before adding ammonia to 2ppm and waiting. those are natural inoculation charts + natural feed acquisition charts for freshwater but how long is the natural cycle for marine tanks? If we set up an all dry marine tank, run it at 78 degrees/ .023 salinity how many months of swirling does it take to cycle, free of charge?

nobody can answer that, which is amazing considering how far we've come with bacterial science. my own guess is 90 days.

 

[flampton]

I wanted to add in here some practical applications for bacteria in our hobby that nobody has documented an answer for

we have lots of answers, just not any definitive testing using tanks or logged readings etc.
The reason I'm posting this is because its amazing in 2020 we know about the dna of our tank bacteria but have not clearly answered these basic questions which drive sales in the hobby bigtime:

1. can a cat litter box next to a reef tank, even a rank one, transmit enough ammonia waft to legit register a spike in a reef next to it, this is the greatest reef mystery naturally we'd start there. Reefcentral alone took years on that one matter in a single thread I recall, and with everybody armed with API readings you know we never got anywhere. Where's the hach nh3 digital meter data for the answer, or a seneye? Nobody knows if litterboxes count as bioload, but everyone has an opinion.


2. Can you starve a cycle out after establishing one. Can ultimate fallow times kill off a cycle, make it not pass nh3 oxidation tests that cycled tanks can pass? Nearly everyone says yes, fast. But we have so far a 3 year fallow thread to track, it didnt starve

the bacteria fed, without our help, for how long? 20 years if kept hydrated, whats the max? Nobody knows if a cycle can be starved, everyone has an opinion


3. does caribsea wet pack sand show up live, able to pass oxidation testing, or not live, and transmitting bacteria only works in a bottle but not a plastic bag of water? does tap rinsing that sand so its not cloudy remove the cycle, if it was verified there prior? nobody knows if the wet pack sand they buy is truly activated, but it says so on the label. bottle bac says activated liquid inside, and we skip cycles with that stuff to the tune of fifty thousand tanks last year alone, it's certainly active.


4. How long does a marine unassisted cycle take. this is my own big question. We know that cycle charts online are from eighty years or so ago

before bottle bac, before adding ammonia to 2ppm and waiting. those are natural inoculation charts + natural feed acquisition charts for freshwater but how long is the natural cycle for marine tanks? If we set up an all dry marine tank, run it at 78 degrees/ .023 salinity how many months of swirling does it take to cycle, free of charge?

nobody can answer that, which is amazing considering how far we've come with bacterial science.

Lots of questions here. They're all not answerable to the degree you want unfortunately without performing experiments.

However that last one I can answer and the timing is variable. Back in the day with the crushed coral and coral skeletons there was no bottled bacteria. However we had started to cycle with fish food (instead of damsels). The cycles variability comes into play because there has to be an inoculation of nitrifiers. Where do those come from? The terrestrial area surrounding your location. Through the water pipes, small bits of soil, dust and whatever else ends up blowing around. So you can't predict without a measurable starting time and amount when they find themselves in your tank. But funnily enough mine was a lot shorter than these massive 60 day cycles I read about on here sometimes. Maybe my area had good dirty water and dust in the air

 

[brandon429]

nice to know, that the natural sourcing handles the salinity variation just fine given enough prep time. I noticed as well that tetra brand bottle bac for cycling handles both fw and saltwater cycles from the same bottle, neat concentrated dual sourcing.

 

[taricha]

Photoheterotrophs-. These guys aren't talked about much. They're in your tank though and they play less of a role in the aquarium. They'll help with decay of organics as well.

are there any members of this group we might have heard of? seems like quite an extravagance to carry around complex photosynthetic machinery in your tiny cell if you can just grab a cheeseburger.

second question (maybe you'll address it when you discus carbon dosing). Should we think of the carbon eaters (Chemoorganoheterotrophs) as many strains of specialists like the dung beetles where a species only bothers with dung from one animal? Or should we think of them more as scrappy generalists like crabs and bristleworms that'll eat literally anything that is edible. Because in this hobby, almost any food source you can imagine - somebody has fed it to their tank.

 

[flampton]

are there any members of this group we might have heard of? seems like quite an extravagance to carry around complex photosynthetic machinery in your tiny cell if you can just grab a cheeseburger.

second question (maybe you'll address it when you discus carbon dosing). Should we think of the carbon eaters (Chemoorganoheterotrophs) as many strains of specialists like the dung beetles where a species only bothers with dung from one animal? Or should we think of them more as scrappy generalists like crabs and bristleworms that'll eat literally anything that is edible. Because in this hobby, almost any food source you can imagine - somebody has fed it to their tank.

Actually none of the photoheterotrophs are commonly talked about, however I will discuss them more in future posts. I'm currently trying to wrap my head around a paper discussing coral feeding in relation to these bacteria and it's implications towards what we should possibly be doing in our aquaria.

Interesting question. It's extremely complicated but the short answer is that most of these guys have their favorite foods but are usually forced to utilize another type of food to maintain their niche. As this is pertinent to carbon dosing I'll definitely be discussing this more.

 

[tvan]

I'm wondering about bio-load vs sustainable bio-mas? And enough surface to handle a ammonia spike(dead fish,dead coal,over feed) or a cascading crash event? In twenty words or less, that's my attention span... JK

 

[ScottR]

I think the question on everyone’s mind is “how can I get more diversity in my bacterial population?” And “how can I get more of the beneficial types?”. Also, if I get frags from a few friends tanks, will their bacteria populate in my tank, making it more diverse?

 

[taricha]

And enough surface to handle a ammonia spike(dead fish,dead coal,over feed) or a cascading crash event?

A tank crash or cascading crash as you say should probably be understood as a low oxygen event rather than an ammonia caused event. When a cloudy bacterial bloom starts, it can drop oxygen quite quickly.
So a dead something that causes the tank to have a bloom probably kills more organisms by depleting oxygen rather than ammonia spike. Because dangerous O2 levels happen well before dangerous ammonia levels.
What I'm saying is that I would wager cascading crashes could be prevented by strong aeration and the bio-filter could handle the ammonia of the original dead livestock. But it can't handle the ammonia of everything killed when the O2 crashes.

 

[tvan]

@taricha I tend to disagree, a crash can happen over months because part of the system is not functioning or non-existent. Or we start chemically adjusting parameters instead of understanding the underlying cause. O2 depletion in an open system with decent gas exchange would seem unlikely IMO. But I'm no expert and that's why I'm here.

 

[ScottR]

@taricha I tend to disagree, a crash can happen over months because part of the system is not functioning or non-existent. Or we start chemically adjusting parameters instead of understanding the underlying cause. O2 depletion in an open system with decent gas exchange would seem unlikely IMO. But I'm no expert and that's why I'm here.

There are many different ways a tank can crash. Typically it’s hard to pinpoint the exact reason why.

 

[tvan]

A tank crash or cascading crash as you say should probably be understood as a low oxygen event rather than an ammonia caused event. When a cloudy bacterial bloom starts, it can drop oxygen quite quickly.
So a dead something that causes the tank to have a bloom probably kills more organisms by depleting oxygen rather than ammonia spike. Because dangerous O2 levels happen well before dangerous ammonia levels.
What I'm saying is that I would wager cascading crashes could be prevented by strong aeration and the bio-filter could handle the ammonia of the original dead livestock. But it can't handle the ammonia of everything killed when the O2 crashes.

Actually I'm more interested in what caused the bloom. And ajusting my system to help accommodate and negate that type of crash.

 

[taricha]

Actually I'm more interested in what caused the bloom.

Protein is like 50-55% Carbon - so a dead fish is plenty of grams of carbon to initiate a bloom.

I tend to disagree, a crash can happen over months because part of the system is not functioning or non-existent.

Slow motion "crash" may not be what most mean by "crash" hmm...
So something harmful builds up over time, and eventually reaches "crash" levels of harm.
There are many who hold that idea - they may all be right - I'm not sure I'm one of them anymore.
To say another way, I'd love to know what the "something" is or see it demonstrated that it accumulates in tanks. Trying to find such stuff is really hard!