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

[tvan]

The problem with(off topic) cleaning rocks with peroxide, the algae grows back... Yes, I too went through the process and even farther(changed the sand and 90% of the water). But slowly changing the enviroment is longer lasting and healthier for the inhabitants. I, added three lava rock columns and three 8" deep sand beds containers into the sump. After three months of heavy growth, the algae appears to be receding. However, there is no scientific proof that anything I've done has had any effect, other then the assumptions I infer.

 

[brandon429]

we are getting the most mileage when the rasping/scraping and peroxide is combined with a 100% cleaning of the sand. relevance here: that breaks every known rule in reefing it really does. *only helpful for nanos though, not too many big tankers want to rip clean. exclude Jon M from that list, he rip cleaned 3x in one month a 120 gallon just to test surface area retention ability (retaining filter bac without recycling) and it retained shockingly well

all this means is for smaller tanks, we get to see remediation not through the lenses of a large tank owner who can't practically access the system completely.

Even before easy access was the key, we still had a high bar set for what bacteria permitted....prior to about 2015 when the rip cleanings started on file, that was an illegal move.

Not any reef tank could survive having its entire sandbed swapped, and the rocks detailed, without recycling. That's false, they all will, for pages-just don't base your success on what Api or red sea has to say, simply trust that ammonia is in control even with the dreaded .25 in place. or .5, or 1.0, all the common things api shows on running reef tanks doing just fine.


the new rules about what bacteria do have also allowed us to know when to call a test kit wrong, that's handy in amassing tank work threads.

 

[tvan]

So, what you are saying is, rip cleaning is only temporary (nano's have to repeat this process regularly). Is it the scrubbing or the peroxide that has the most effect? Do you @brandon429 dose peroxide daily? What changes do you observe? What are your ammonia, nitrite, nitrate levels after a week of dosing? How well do your fish, cuc, coral handle a rip cleaning and a steady diet of hydrogen peroxide?

Even before easy access was the key, we still had a high bar set for what bacteria permitted....prior to about 2015 when the rip cleanings started on file, that was an illegal move.

What does this even mean?

 

[brandon429]

you can discern the meaning from context of following sentences after that statement or not, no prob w me ~

my tank only gets 35% peroxide on the inside glass walls, its a skimmerless old pico so naturally the organics + decay w be higher in my setup and that implants as ugly yellow and green stains. The only zones not covered in purple coralline 16 yrs old are the ones that get algae. My rocks are all either coralline or a living mouth/cnidarian so they literally exclude algae work and earn the cruise control condition that everyone tries to start out with (hands off is for purple setups, hands on is for white brand new setups)


I last treated my rocks for algae in 2010 or there abouts, its when I found out about peroxide.

I do not own test kits for any param other than temp or salinity, and in every work thread for thousands of pages we do not ask for the poster's parameters, because we're all horseshoeing here in the hobby, so what would their reports matter- we know what bacteria do without any testing, its why these tanks stay alive after breaking all procedural rules. its the finer points we need to fill in / define but the major principles for new procedures are already being tested widescale we can see.

of course if someone has hanna digital nitrite, and a calibrated running seneye digital nh3 meter, we'd accept and be interested in that data.

we earn this change, overnite, by our system also neutralizing the rule that nothing happens fast and good at the same time in reefing. Im not sure any rule ever made for reefing procedure is firm, and they all involve what bacteria permit or don't permit as the boundary zones

Gators tank 24 hours ago:

Gator's tank as of nine am this morning, with all new sand.

the rocks were rasped clean using dentists tools

then 12% strong peroxide placed on the former cleaned spots, avoiding the already clean areas.

his ammonia is in the thousandths ppm, though he has a color test kit registering higher. which we know to ignore.

his water is so clear in the new redone old tank that it looks empty, you cannot have nh3 noncontrol where fish swim down low, feed normally, act normally, with laser clear water.


nh3 noncontrol manifests oppositely, always. we can discern this actual ammonia reading not off his current guess reading from api, but from five thousand seneye readings logged by others using the same surface area he's using-a huge massive redundant amount.

these are part of the new rules for how cycling works in reefing...we needed new rules since the old ones no longer apply. if any reader of this thread is making after pics like that in teamwork with other reefers, post the link we want to see multi options for that type of turnaround earned any way you can do it.

a person can't do this much action to a reef and keep it alive using bunk/bad science, we think these types of rescues are reefing version of CPR / 911 services.

a benefit from the action above is the clean palette vs invaded mass option, now options he applies to prevent growback have far less mass to work on, so the effort is amplified vs doing what the masses do: bulk up the tank with invasion, work back slowly in increments over eight months, then get cyano from all the compounded waste.

 

[brandon429]

I have never seen any author, book writer, chemist or scientist ever agree with my statements on the predictability of ammonia above.

but I have seen about half a million dollars of other people's reef money agree with the statements, their testimony and pics do matter as a collective source of data. every action taken harshly not factoring in params depend on stated surface area mechanics/microbiology to be correct, this cannot be lucked into. dead reefs would be everywhere.



to me this is the new wave, the rulebreaking part and the documentation part. the claims aren't anything without fifty pages of tests by people across the globe. mining web posts for veins of true science is exactly like mining for gold out of the side of a huge mountain. the patterns found in massive work threads demand a rewriting of the rules to explain why breaking the rules has such fantastic outcomes.

 

[tvan]

My comprehension level has nothing to do with understanding your writing or lack of. Thank-you for posting information about your system. Reefing has been around since the late 50's early 60's with very little real change. Nature creates the rules, we choose whether or not to ignore them.
You say this:

we earn this change, overnite, by our system also neutralizing the rule that nothing happens fast and good at the same time in reefing. Im not sure any rule ever made for reefing procedure is firm, and they all involve what bacteria permit or don't permit as the boundary zones

Then show pictures of algae removal... Not testing anything Gator has no idea what is happening in that small environment or the long term effects. The pictures look great, but what's happening under the hood?

 

[User]

Microscopes come in pretty handy. You can buy one for less than most coral frags or the other things stored under your tank.

there are plenty of ID guides. And if you can’t get the answer yourself, you will get a much better answer on R2R with a microscope pic/video.

not if you want one that actually works or isn’t going to drive you nuts.

as a career microbiologist myself, the minimum model I would buy for this- and I say this to set an expectation for complete novices that are new to microscopy- would be the ~$130 range microscopes on Amazon. Anything less than that is too finicky. And get one with a mechanical stage. You don’t want to be moving a stage manually while looking at this stuff.

so, a little more than a frag, but the extra investment means you will actually be able to gain confidence in using it and then actually use it.

 

[User]

Snoop
Lemme check old archives sec. that issue Is among the litany of causes we attribute to .25 free ammonia reads in reefkeeping


sustained .25 ammonia noncontrol is the biggest misconception against bacteria we have going for us. We can thank api + folks forgetting to do TAN conversions before reporting suspected levels, my chemistry friends remind me that nh3 is in the hundredths ppm in most of the reported cases where tenths ppm nh3 was the original concern

Cat liter boxes and ammonia - Reef Central Online Community

Cat liter boxes and ammonia The Reef Chemistry Forum

www.reefcentral.com

His levels reported for .8 ppm

lol
not digital, thats a human mind making up the best number to reference a color someone else would read as .2

i don’t buy it, they didn’t have access to a calibrated seneye they had Red Sea ammonia, 85% as bad at indicating false reads as api

gaseous ammonia gets in no doubt, and then is nearly instantly oxidized just like when a seneye owner has a fish die in the tank and the readings dont spike, the systems handle variation in ammonia just fine. Red Sea will report the lost fish for the next four months and the owner will certainly buy four bottles of bacteria to offset the risk, and dose bacteria that certainly could not make it without us.

if y’all have enough detectable ammonia from cat litter boxes, all y’all gross people need to start changing your litter box out more often.

I have zero confidence in your assertion that free floating ammonia fumes from cat litter is a cause of the 0.25ppm phenomenon. Absurd.

 

[brandon429]

remember though: I agree with you. its not like I typed briefly on the matter above he he so if that wasn't clear then we are all set.

above all humans Im the one who does no believe anyone's posted .25 ever, not ever lol. that link showing they thought cat litter caused the .25 I found to be a misattribution, cannot occur.

there is no time in reefing where .25 holds and remains in a running reef tank, the active surface area will never permit the excess it will oxidize it all right up, in 3 minutes after addition posts show...

I have never read in any forum, book or article or google scholar link that it is impossible to have a sustained .25 condition in a running common reef tank. we had to discern it

off giant threads and it turns out to be a hidden function of contacting this much water to surface area in the middle of the display, rapidly.

our tanks do not conrol nh3 differently after the cycle. prior cycling rules had us believe ammonia control ranges tank to tank, this justified the common misreads they were getting on the non seneye ammonia tests of the last thirty years, when the rules were getting made.

 

[MnFish1]

@brandon429 Maybe I missed your answer - or maybe I didn't ask it clearly - In this 'thread' - are you referring to adding H2O2 - to the whole tank or more about spot treating and cleaning algae from rocks. It is my opinion (based on my calculations) - that adding the amounts of H2O2 that 'most people' suggest will do nothing to reduce algae - and even Taricha's higher dose with 35 % is far from a bactericidal dose - so I'm wondering why you're surprised that the bacterial filter is not affected by this dose?

 

[brandon429]

It’s the going thought that peroxide of 3% will indeed harm the bacteria and restart the cycle, maybe not right here where we’ve been reefing and seen it’s use a while but in greater reefing.


also agreed on the growback/ ability to clear tanks it doesn’t remove mass very well by itself, but we use peroxide differently: on rocks sitting in the air (another claimed extreme bacterial risk in most forums) and we have used a knife to score and debride the algae clean off as if it’s burn tissue. The mass is cleared by scoring, totally clean before any peroxide in order to amplify its action on target and by extension all bacteria in the worked area.

Gator removed all sand, and used 12% not 3% peroxide on 80% of his rocks, still no recycle that amazes me too.

in the cleaned spots, in the air, we apply the peroxide on the former algae spots and now the peroxide is making a huge difference, it’s burning hold fast cells and anchors. 100% of the sandbed was changed for new dry sand, this is robbing half his apparent surface area.

if we described all these steps in order to someone in a poll without any context, they’d all vote it will kill the tank bacteria to the point of a recycle. What the greater community thinks about bacteria is totally backwards, run some polls without context to check some predictions and we can see if the collective thought has changed any

-does being in air make rock recycle?

-does applying 3% peroxide to the aquarium water kill filter bacteria? how about rocks directly, not to the water where the 3% is highly diluted?

- can filter bacteria be starved (meaning if we stop feeding a post cycle reef, does it lose nitrification ability?) is there a limit of safe fallow time?

-does instantly changing a sandbed cause a cycle? What about instantly removing one and putting no sand back, bare bottom install. do we have to work in increments to be safe?

there’s more but you can see the trend...we have just massive work logs on file to show the null is true for each situation above and I predict high 80-90% percentile in a poll each one of those questions will garner a yes, will harm all filter bac response.

 

[brandon429]

wrong post edit, multi windows going here

 

[SMSREEF]

Microscopes come in pretty handy. You can buy one for less than most coral frags or the other things stored under your tank.

not if you want one that actually works or isn’t going to drive you nuts.

as a career microbiologist myself, the minimum model I would buy for this- and I say this to set an expectation for complete novices that are new to microscopy- would be the ~$130 range microscopes on Amazon. Anything less than that is too finicky. And get one with a mechanical stage. You don’t want to be moving a stage manually while looking at this stuff.

so, a little more than a frag, but the extra investment means you will actually be able to gain confidence in using it and then actually use it.

Agreed, moving my slide by hand is a total PITA!

However a cheap microscope is great for getting a pic that can tell the difference between chrysophyte, cyano, different dinos, etc.

My cheap scope enabled me to snap a pic that @taricha identified as chrysophyte.

Is it for a microbiologist, certainly not.
Is it for a reefer posting pics of brown algae saying “what is this and how do I get rid of it?” Yes.

I will get a better scope someday, but a cheap one is certainly better than nothing.

 

[User1]

you can discern the meaning from context of following sentences after that statement or not, no prob w me ~

my tank only gets 35% peroxide on the inside glass walls, its a skimmerless old pico so naturally the organics + decay w be higher in my setup and that implants as ugly yellow and green stains. The only zones not covered in purple coralline 16 yrs old are the ones that get algae. My rocks are all either coralline or a living mouth/cnidarian so they literally exclude algae work and earn the cruise control condition that everyone tries to start out with (hands off is for purple setups, hands on is for white brand new setups)


I last treated my rocks for algae in 2010 or there abouts, its when I found out about peroxide.

I do not own test kits for any param other than temp or salinity, and in every work thread for thousands of pages we do not ask for the poster's parameters, because we're all horseshoeing here in the hobby, so what would their reports matter- we know what bacteria do without any testing, its why these tanks stay alive after breaking all procedural rules. its the finer points we need to fill in / define but the major principles for new procedures are already being tested widescale we can see.

of course if someone has hanna digital nitrite, and a calibrated running seneye digital nh3 meter, we'd accept and be interested in that data.

we earn this change, overnite, by our system also neutralizing the rule that nothing happens fast and good at the same time in reefing. Im not sure any rule ever made for reefing procedure is firm, and they all involve what bacteria permit or don't permit as the boundary zones

Gators tank 24 hours ago:

Gator's tank as of nine am this morning, with all new sand.

the rocks were rasped clean using dentists tools

then 12% strong peroxide placed on the former cleaned spots, avoiding the already clean areas.

his ammonia is in the thousandths ppm, though he has a color test kit registering higher. which we know to ignore.

his water is so clear in the new redone old tank that it looks empty, you cannot have nh3 noncontrol where fish swim down low, feed normally, act normally, with laser clear water.


nh3 noncontrol manifests oppositely, always. we can discern this actual ammonia reading not off his current guess reading from api, but from five thousand seneye readings logged by others using the same surface area he's using-a huge massive redundant amount.

these are part of the new rules for how cycling works in reefing...we needed new rules since the old ones no longer apply. if any reader of this thread is making after pics like that in teamwork with other reefers, post the link we want to see multi options for that type of turnaround earned any way you can do it.

a person can't do this much action to a reef and keep it alive using bunk/bad science, we think these types of rescues are reefing version of CPR / 911 services.

a benefit from the action above is the clean palette vs invaded mass option, now options he applies to prevent growback have far less mass to work on, so the effort is amplified vs doing what the masses do: bulk up the tank with invasion, work back slowly in increments over eight months, then get cyano from all the compounded waste.

Honestly I would have put snails in there and been done with it. Mother Nature created things to solve this problem naturally. There are only two things to note when adding snails to assist in algae control regardless of how bad it is. One is to order the proper amount. You don't want to order 100 or more when you only need 50. Removed too fast, more poop, and then some starve. Whatever chemistry is again out of whack.

The second issue is making them work. If you come home or wake up or pass by and see snails on the glass instead of the rocks with the algae then they are cheating. Gently remove, give a stern warning, and place properly on a rock further away from a tank wall. This way they are back to focus on said rocks and not glass...

 

[Garf]

It’s the going thought that peroxide of 3% will indeed harm the bacteria and restart the cycle, maybe not right here where we’ve been reefing and seen it’s use a while but in greater reefing.


also agreed on the growback/ ability to clear tanks it doesn’t remove mass very well by itself, but we use peroxide differently: on rocks sitting in the air (another claimed extreme bacterial risk in most forums) and we have used a knife to score and debride the algae clean off as if it’s burn tissue. The mass is cleared by scoring, totally clean before any peroxide in order to amplify its action on target and by extension all bacteria in the worked area.

Gator removed all sand, and used 12% not 3% peroxide on 80% of his rocks, still no recycle that amazes me too.

in the cleaned spots, in the air, we apply the peroxide on the former algae spots and now the peroxide is making a huge difference, it’s burning hold fast cells and anchors. 100% of the sandbed was changed for new dry sand, this is robbing half his apparent surface area.

if we described all these steps in order to someone in a poll without any context, they’d all vote it will kill the tank bacteria to the point of a recycle. What the greater community thinks about bacteria is totally backwards, run some polls without context to check some predictions and we can see if the collective thought has changed any

-does being in air make rock recycle?

-does applying 3% peroxide to the aquarium water kill filter bacteria? how about rocks directly, not to the water where the 3% is highly diluted?

- can filter bacteria be starved (meaning if we stop feeding a post cycle reef, does it lose nitrification ability?) is there a limit of safe fallow time?

-does instantly changing a sandbed cause a cycle? What about instantly removing one and putting no sand back, bare bottom install. do we have to work in increments to be safe?

there’s more but you can see the trend...we have just massive work logs on file to show the null is true for each situation above and I predict high 80-90% percentile in a poll each one of those questions will garner a yes, will harm all filter bac response.

Hi Brandon. Have you got a link for pics of tanks that have undergone this process, say a couple of months after treatment.
I’ve spent a long time researching algae scrubbers. There are certain things that these require to grow well;
A hard(ish) surface -check
Flow. -check
Light. -check
Inoculation -check
Nutrients. -check
Absence of bacterial film. -check
Absence of microfauna. -check
Absence of snails / herbivores. ?
I can’t help but think this method is promoting IN TANK algae scrubbers.

Cheers

 

[Lasse]

I have never seen any author, book writer, chemist or scientist ever agree with my statements on the predictability of ammonia above.

That´s true - I just wonder why?

Sincerely Lasse

 

[User]

That´s true - I just wonder why?

Sincerely Lasse

Oh no you didn’t!!’

 

[User]

Agreed, moving my slide by hand is a total PITA!

However a cheap microscope is great for getting a pic that can tell the difference between chrysophyte, cyano, different dinos, etc.

My cheap scope enabled me to snap a pic that @taricha identified as chrysophyte.

Is it for a microbiologist, certainly not.
Is it for a reefer posting pics of brown algae saying “what is this and how do I get rid of it?” Yes.

I will get a better scope someday, but a cheap one is certainly better than nothing.

Yeah, fair enough- but chrysophytes is so distinctive that you could ID with a backwards 10x lens held close (only kidding, but I know what you mean). Even one of those ‘microscope lenses’ that slip over a phone camera lens will let you approximately identify most large algae species. I’ve even used two piggybacked to identify gram positive from gram negative bacteria (just looking for pink vs purple) but it worked.

saying all that- I’m glad you appreciate the utility of a microscope. Any microscope. Having more people get into working with them is amazing, and i hope they feel the same new wonder every time I put a slide on the stage.

 

[User]

OP hasn’t been in this thread since 12/22.

you crazies scare another one out of their own thread?

 

[brandon429]

@Lasse

its maybe the power of groupthink and the recency of seneye

perhaps sales of retail items drop when we discover and make use of bacterial truths, it’s better for $ for the hobby to doubt what bacteria do and need reinforcements, for charge.

currently, every positive nitrite reading regardless of truth sells a new bottle of remedy. Same for all raised ammonia readings, in post cycle tanks.

if the hobby was always able to see what nh3 does beyond .25 / at the thousandths ppm levels then we would not have been backwards wrong about what bacteria do this long


its just exactly like when you told the poster he couldn’t remove bioballs immediately without risking nitrification upset, thats groupthink and here’s the opposite (removing far more than bioballs, fifty pages, no loss, nitrification isn’t harmed)


you have known for 3 years about this thread but the findings are still ignored, yet everyday we collect new examples to offset your claims about surface area removal impacts.

Official Sand Rinse and Tank Transfer thread

I am fairly worried about moving my freshwater setup as it is fairly overstocked (reduces aggression as no one fish gets singled out). I did fail to think about the toxicity of nitrite on top of ammonia toxicity... Here is my plan for the cichlid tank. I have gradually reduced my pH from 8.2 to...

www.reef2reef.com

(Mindstream digital nh3 showed no change in nitrification after instant sandbed removal, that was claimed impossible in the hobby as a firm rule even though it’s disproven right there. Seneye jobs showing same outcome are in there too)

yes yes I know work threads are invalid here, show no science, have no basis in reality- because all critics have done the same work to define opposing concepts it just can’t ever be linked for reading lol


someone here post me a link, article or book entry on pico reefs before the year 2001

you can’t

and now we have them x 2 million. The first work threads are in ‘02 long before the validation.

so when authors fail to introduce new concepts, does that mean there aren’t any? just because they haven’t updated microbiology in reefing and prefer to sell us bottle bac instead doesn’t mean others haven’t been logging discoveries and patterns




it sure would be nice to get application links I can read myself when reading the critiques, from prior work registered before this thread and not from a university study, something the critic has found in their hard work logged

I see not one work thread in ten pages, you guys just been quarterbacking this whole time with your own reefs? No wonder groupthink prevails, you don’t get to see new patterns unfurl by outbound works. You get to see what happens in your living room, that’s slow evolution

This thread will be a handy source one day in ten years, let’s see what changes come in the hobby

recruiting others en masse to try new approaches is a fine way to make permanent change in the hobby, and be accountable for claims made against the group


forum skepticism performs a vital function of culling bad practices and making a high bar for acceptance, there’s no other group of people I’d rather be working with than two hundred unwilling skeptical but professional reef aquarists.

gaining buy in from that group eventually is savory like a little steak morsel cooked just right