Suggestions - different bacteria to dose

[GuppyHJD]

Hello
Happy Saturday.
My tank has only been running 8 months. My LFS store recommended I do a daily dose of Seachem Stability. When it ran out, I started dosing Microbactr7. I am wondering - any other bacteria I should dose for a while. I looked at Fritz but I called for huge doses.
The LFS is recommending I go back to Stability until the one year mark.

 

[StPatrick89]

Why are you dosing bacteria?

 

[Spare time]

Stability doesn't need to be added unless you are replacing rocks, sand, biomedia, having ammonia issues, or adding lots of fish at once. I would recommend these for maitenance:

PNS Probio plus any of the following


Seachem Pristine
Microbacter Clean
Dr. Tim's Waste Away
Fritz Monster
or other "cleaning" bacterias"

 

[ZoWhat]

Keep dosing bacteria your po4 and no3 will bottom out at 0 leading to some major issues. A reefs need 2-5ppm of no3 and 0.1ppm of po4 to keep the ecobalance stable. Imo you're overdoing it

 

[Sun.singh2009]

I second the need to dose Stability and other bacteria only after a major change in your tank. I suggest you stop dosing unless you do a large water change, something dies, or you add more fish.

 

[brandon429]

Your lfs has been wrong, don’t add cycling bac to a cycled tank, it doesn’t help anything. They are using bad science to get money out of folks, but they may not know it. The bottle bac sales machine is at fault, likely not the actual lfs they mean well

 

[brandon429]

When you would NOT buy or use bottled bacteria

We know that the sales machine behind bottle bacteria needs a counter balance. let's discuss here specific times we would not click buy, times we wouldnt add oxygen-competing bulk organisms to a reef tank. 1. anytime you are dealing with display tank rocks that are cycled All common...

www.reef2reef.com

we need to get an lfs’ response to that thread

can you post it on their Facebook page or something, link back to us here, we want to keep them honest


you don’t need to add any form of any bacteria from a bottle to this tank for the life of this tank.

 

[Dan_P]

Hello
Happy Saturday.
My tank has only been running 8 months. My LFS store recommended I do a daily dose of Seachem Stability. When it ran out, I started dosing Microbactr7. I am wondering - any other bacteria I should dose for a while. I looked at Fritz but I called for huge doses.
The LFS is recommending I go back to Stability until the one year mark.

Stop dosing bacteria. Except for the bacteria you add to start an aquarium, the other products are likely to be useless.

 

[brandon429]

Dan considering your work in the chemistry forum on a few of the products listed above, it will be neat to see one day when anyone makes a comparable thread showing what the digesting products claim to actually do / accomplish


waste away can be ruled out of functionality based on Tarichas thread on it, I recall. The bottled bacteria sales machine is a strong, strong influence in our hobby. To the tune of millions of dollars annually / unneeded sales

 

[GuppyHJD]

Why are you dosing bacteria?

I was told the tank needs to build up enough to out compete algae

 

[GuppyHJD]

Keep dosing bacteria your po4 and no3 will bottom out at 0 leading to some major issues. A reefs need 2-5ppm of no3 and 0.1ppm of po4 to keep the ecobalance stable. Imo you're overdoing it

My po4 is .17 and no3 is 25 currently

 

[ZoWhat]

I was told the tank needs to build up enough to out compete algae

Yes. And that product is some sort of home brewed phytoplankton. Best variation of phyto is tetraselmis.

Search this board on the hundreds of ppl who run successful tanks dosing some type of phytoplankton every night

 

[Dan_P]

Dan considering your work in the chemistry forum on a few of the products listed above, it will be neat to see one day when anyone makes a comparable thread showing what the digesting products claim to actually do / accomplish


waste away can be ruled out of functionality based on Tarichas thread on it, I recall. The bottled bacteria sales machine is a strong, strong influence in our hobby. To the tune of millions of dollars annually / unneeded sales

@taricha is performing a very careful examination of bottled bacteria. It is quite involved. Masters of Science stuff.

My own study was quite short lived because the bottled bacteria did not show any signs of growth under aquarium conditions. Only after I gave them a high dose of nutrients did they start to grow, but never as well as aquarium bacteria. So I abondoned my study. Who wants to study duds

@taricha went the extra mile to get them to grow well and then did a study that determined at what “food” level they stopped growing well. I have peeked over his shoulder at the data and have not changed my mind about the uselessness of these products

I have two additional thoughts. If you don’t have any bacteria other than denitrification bacteria in your aquarium, I wonder if these bottled bacteria might grow because they aren’t competing against super hot resident bacteria. The second notion is whether the bottled bacteria turn into superbugs when they land and take up residence in existing aquarium biofilms. Maybe living in a biofilm is easier than in water.

 

[taricha]

@taricha is performing a very careful examination of bottled bacteria. It is quite involved. Masters of Science stuff.

My own study was quite short lived because the bottled bacteria did not show any signs of growth under aquarium conditions. Only after I gave them a high dose of nutrients did they start to grow, but never as well as aquarium bacteria. So I abondoned my study. Who wants to study duds

It is very hard to quantify zero. Takes a lot of work.

@taricha went the extra mile to get them to grow well and then did a study that determined at what “food” level they stopped growing well. I have peeked over his shoulder at the data and have not changed my mind about the uselessness of these products

Perhaps I should have just run a quick study of carbon dosing instead. It's easy to show that nearly all of the desirable things that bottle bac promises and people say they dose for are doable with carbon dosing.
It's quite difficult to measure anything that bottle bac do (better than bacteria in my tank water) that people in the hobby claim the bottles help them with.

To clarify, this is about grunge-eaters. The bottles of true nitrifiers do what they say.