yes, this is why ghost feeding is not required for bacterial support: these animals were accessing feed long before we showed up.
aquarists cannot stop a cycle from occurring unless they add medications, dry the system (which changes to another group of bacteria, bacteria still reside) or subject the system to massive temp extremes.
Withholding feed, or spiking your system water to 8 ppm isn't on the list for good reasons... though you can find sources that say 5 ppm will suppress a nitrifying bed or that if we don't feed, bacteria will die. They don't, in an aquarium. They do in a lab that is using strict controls to make claims so that other labs cannot prove them wrong.
nitrifiers on a cold sterile glass slide, submerged in autoclaved water reconstituted with salt, in a microbiology lab that controls air pressure and air contamination, would indeed starve if we withheld every form of carbon/nitrogen and base nutrient they needed. an aquarium and a home cannot do that, it provides feed right to the tank.
that's why context matters in microbiology
if I had to guess, the #1 food source for bacteria that we stopped feeding is other bacteria. non filtration types are getting in constantly, they bloom because there's water and not any other need, and then they slowly die off because they're not aquatic or marine variants.
their dying mass provides __________for nitrifiers who are housed in the same scum complex
a gnat that lands in the tank, by our arms and hands, sneeze aerosols, list is huge on how both nitrifiers and non nitrifiers get in. egon says spores molds and fungus also get in our tanks, true. when they decay, ________ is provided to nitrifiers
all this is invisible, and trace amounts, and that's what they've adapted to. our massive overfeeding is just a luxury for them.
hydration is the need not the feed we add, because we want to select the surface area for submerged bacterial colonization. they resource their own feed when we withhold it.
lastly, you can find material that says bacterial colonies downscale when we withhold feed they were adapted to. but the context application for us is that we are dealing with massive overages in surface areas for the bioload we keep. I see no systems running so low on live rock that if they removed their sand and a canister filter the system couldn't nitrify just fine. that means when you downscale a system (they didn't say sterilize) you are still dealing with colonies dense enough to cover 100% of the active surface area that was already vast and more than needed. colony density and numbers can downscale, and still meet our fish bioload needs just fine.
The impact to what an aquarist measures and what they need from a biofilter isn't changed by periods of feed withholding.
its fun to post and make commentary about bacteria, and nerd out, but in the end the reason for doing so is that you can do things to an aquarium most people wouldn't do if you really know what bacteria allow. perhaps clean one, flip one, transport one, upgrade downgrade grow in a jar grow a reef in a bucket, drain one, blend two reefs together, all without causing a cycle.
All that above is for dry systems that were recently cycled, how they survive.
If you pull feed from a purple coralline live rock system then the effect is nearly unmeasurable, any aged reef system has so many organics in tow the food source will not run out for years. you could stop feeding a reef tank for ten years, and at the end of a decade do a full water change to remove the filth, fill it back up, and it will pass a digestion test. The number of years without feed is also not part of our list above of things that actually harm bacteria to a degree we can measure it.
aquarists and cyclers need only concern over bacteria if they are going to dry the system, add medications, or subject the system to an abnormal temp extreme. that list of just three, so far, gives us lots of freedom to do things the 80s and 90s didn't allow in aquarium science. back then, tanks crashed for "unknown reasons" and seemed to choose their place in time.
2017, we command all cycles and force them to do our bidding. we can engineer a reef to not crash if we can control all hardware variables, the biology is solid now.
