goes in a certain order of what it effects
Works the same way with scrubbers:
The weaker photosynthesizing algae, which are any of the brown dust types, go first because they don't pull nutrients very hard, because they can't anchor well and thus can't make use of strong currents (much less, turbulent air/water interfaces).
Chaeto is next; it is opaque and blocks a lot of flow, so it is a weaker puller of nutrients, and also cannot anchor, and thus can't make use of strong currents (much less air/water interfaces).
Next comes GHA, which has more of a translucent "antenna" to catch flow and light; it can extract nutrients from the water longer, and anchor in high flow and air/water interfaces, and thus survive longer by extracting nutrients even when barely available. Unless of coarse the GHA is being eaten by fish.
Next come the tough ones that have hard nutrient strategies:
Bubble, which concentrates low levels of nutrients (when available) that are outside the bubble, into to high levels of nutrients inside the bubble. So even if nutrients go to zero outside, it has some stored inside and will take an abnormally long time to deplete.
Bryopsis, which uses "roots" to extract nutrients deep in rock. Even when nutrients in water are zero, it can survive from the rock. So only after depleting the nutrients in the rock, for a long time, do you kill bryopsis by nutrient removal.
And then cyano (and maybe dino's), which do not care about any of this; they can feed on food paricles, so if your CUC is not consuming the the particles, you will probably get cyano if there is any phosphate available at all. Dino's seem to be the one major difference between scrubbers and Vibrant: Scrubbers remove dino's first, and Vibrant seems to remove them last.
VibrantBacteriaCircled by Jason, on Flickr
