If they go dormant, then water dog and I didn’t do this fifty times in the 80s
If they go dormant then nobody clicked on my three year fallow thread link.
Water and time in a home equals microbiome, short time. Water equals catch more food for bac that we can’t see, as long as there is water
Any running reef tank has organic reserves in it that you can’t get out, they’re bac food forever, on top of daily input, the reason we can’t see bac food is the same reason we can’t see bac with the unaided eye. The fallow tanks are the most easy to envision for those familiar with bacteria...it’s the unassisted 30 day cycles, no feed no human inoculation that really boggles the mind... but an 80s unassisted cycler smiles and recalls a simpler, less retail-coaxing my every approach to science time.
What goes dormant would be a monoculture of any given bac, on selective agar, under the right temps, in my positive pressure microbiology lab / but not a home.
A home always contributes bac to any hydrated sample, by the minute. Lasse kept tanks in the eighties but I guess he used soil or some seed source for starters...he never had to go straight epoxy gravel and plastic plants like we did. The mosh has started inevitably now. It took me nine pages of fishing pun intended in our test scenario thread above and only water dog wrote it so eloquently, everyone else went all phd on us.
When I made the distraction of asking in that thread “what if I added ten new canister filters to the system, would they too upcycle in a month if we didn’t increase feed?” and then the doctors chimed in all certain with a choral no, that’s like asking if Water dog was able to cycle more than one tank unassisted in his home...of course he could cycle one tank. Or ten, or however many tanks fit in his home...all by day 30 of only adding water. the system doesn’t behave differently if the tanks are unconnected or not, I just know the masses are held up on anthropomorphism/bac do what humans do/ and one can frame questions in such a way as to bring that fact brightly into the light. The masses will never agree, and the retail bottle bac machine $ wants it that way.
Go to your sink and input four ounces of tap water into a cup. You now have excellent bottle bac and nitrifers all set to go. Our tap water is shooting bac all over the place, when we shower, bac are aerosolized and cast around the entire home... I could plate nitrifiers off anyone's drywall, but withhold feed from an aquarium and nitrifers die?
we can’t even make our own tap water bac free...but aquarists can tell us nine ways to make a dirty old aquarium control what hydrated bacteria do?
Somebody right now, set up a test vat for fallow testing in your garage. Let it go unheated uncooled through all seasons and merely keep it vented (air) and topped off. Oxidize test it in 2025, confirm what we already posted and then some, it'll be an awesome article about how we used to envision tank bacteria long ago
