posts from Dr. Tim in the forum state/support that current # of processing bacterial cells can choose to step up and process much more ammonia, the shock absorber effect.
Can you please link that for me? I'd like to read more about it. Thanks in advance.
While I believe that current bacteria populations can process the daily variations in ammonia production (like additional fish or coral food), I was under the impression that the bacteria populations will ultimately adjust based on the availability of their food supply (ammonia and nitrite production). Although it might not be quite this simple, as I've read somewhere that this bacteria can go dormant for awhile, when deprived of an ammonia source.
Assuming the above to be true (what you're calling old science), I can see why people recommend adding bottled bacteria when the current population can't meet the current ammonia production (usually a short term event, as the populations will ultimately adjust). Logically this seems to make sense, as dosed bacteria starts processing bacteria immediately (even before they colonize onto the hard surfaces).
However, dosing bottled bacteria might be of limited benefit. It seems to work better at seeding bacteria, than processing massive amounts of ammonia (as it doesn't instantly eliminate ammonia). I assume that it's a numbers game. Anyways, I feel that dosing bacteria won't do any harm to your tank (just your pocketbook). But you could be right, in that it's just a drop in a bucket when considering the bacteria populations in our established tanks.
they're all symptomless other than a test kit reading on some gradient ran with a method/procedure we can't verify.
I'm not so sure that we can't verify elevated levels of ammonia (at least to some extent). Some of these examples use different brands of kits to verify the results (although maybe not yielding an exact concentration). And in the case of the
Adding Ammonia to Established Tank for Nitrate Control, we see a Seneye monitor essentially verify an API kit (this thread is probably also a good example of the shock absorber effect that you mentioned earlier).
look at this example below of a misread. old cycling science does not go into test misreads, it only functions on an alert subjective mode each umpire randomly chooses to honor. I see cycling science as a set of rules that governs the accuracy of test kits, not the other way around.
I didn't read the whole thread, but I'm not sure that I saw a misread. Although your impressions about how many people interpret API's ammonia test results might not be wrong. API measures total ammonia, not free ammonia. So while it's still showing an elevated level of total ammonia (making no claims about it being either safe or unsafe), the NH3 level might actually be safe for fish (less than 0.020 ppm of NH3, per Seneye). We'd really have to know the pH level to be able to make any kind of safety assessment when measuring total ammonia.
The nice thing about Seneye, and to a lessor extent Seachem Ammonia Alert, is that they read NH3 versus NH3 + NH4. It saves some work in computing free ammonia and making a call about safety levels. I agree that there are all sorts of wild claims about ammonia, like stalled cycles. But of course you're right, the nitrogen cycle doesn't stall. But that doesn't mean elevated levels cannot occur (at least temporarily).
