I do not trust any AI to give a good resonse for fish things when it actuially involves the science. It often hallucintates answers. I turn off AI wherever I can. Where I find the Gpoogle AI usedful is when I already know the snaswer but if I know the AI got it right, it becomes easier to cut and paste than to create the answer.
I have yet to believe that AI is actually intelligenc, it is just a faster searcher for answer but many have no idea that they are incorrect. Chrck yhe siurces Google uses to come up with it's I answers on fish things. I find a lot of the time the answers it offers comes from -places on the net I would not trust.
There is a reason I am not on any social media at all is that most of what is on it is BS. It is more like gossip than anything intelligent. So, you trust what you want to and i will distrust what I want. And we can both be happy.
I just went to Google and asked it "how do I cycle a fresh water aquarium." the answer were half right and half either wrong or incomplete.
Here are two examples
Fish Food Method: Alternatively, crush and drop a pinch of fish food into the tank. As it decays, it will naturally release ammonia.
The source for this junk is Reddit. Now here is what the PhD microbiologist Dr. Timothy Hovanec says about this (Bold added by me):
Using shrimp or fish food
One of the more popular fishless cycling methods is to buy a few dead shrimp at the grocery store, cut them up into chunks and add them to the aquarium. The shrimp decay, which produces ammonia to feed the nitrifying bacteria. There are a few drawbacks with this method, one being that the hobbyist really has no way to know how much ammonia is being produced by the decaying shrimp, and the aquarium does not look very good with dead shrimp laying on the bottom. Also, the organic material of the shrimp can cause bacteria blooms which turn the aquarium water cloudy. This method works but it takes time and patience and you will probably see a spike in ammonia and nitrite if you add a medium to heavy load of fish after the initial cycling. Note that some people use flake fish food instead of shrimp but this is not recommended because flake food does not have much organic material compared to shrimp and so does not add a lot of ammonia to the water, but you can use cut fish instead of shrimp.
Then the AI tells is this:
Liquid Bacteria: Purchase a concentrated nitrifying bacteria starter (such as Tetra SafeStart or FritzZyme) and dose according to the instructions.
The nitrifying bacteria do not form spores, they reproduce by dividing. Almost no brands of starter bacteria contain Nitrospira due to patents. So Fritz does not have the needed bacteria in its bottle. Read Dr. Hovanevcs and other papers on this topic and you will see that what Fritz says it in its bacteria starter for nitrite is:
The primary
nitrite-oxidizing bacteria (NOB) found in FritzZyme products belong to the genus
Nitrobacter. [
1]
The above is credited to be from Fritz. Now here is what Dr. Hovanec's paper states about this:
Identification of putative Nitrospira-Like NOB.
Five samples were screened for NOB by either clone library development or DGGE. A total of 96 clones or excised bands were partially sequenced. Of these, 11 were highly similar to members of the
Nitrospira group but none were similar to
Nitrobacter spp.
Incidentally, since this and many other papers in support of Nitrospira being the nitrite oxidizer in tank, one of the biggest discoveries about some strains of Nitrospira was:
Abstract
Nitrification, the oxidation of ammonia via nitrite to nitrate, has always been considered as a two-step process catalyzed by chemolithoautotrophic microorganisms oxidizing either ammonia or nitrite. No known nitrifier carries out both steps, although complete nitrification should be energetically advantageous. This functional separation has puzzled microbiologists for a century. Here we report on the discovery and cultivation of a completely nitrifying bacterium from the genus Nitrospira, a globally distributed group of nitrite oxidizers. The genome of this chemolithoautotrophic organism encodes both the pathways for ammonia and nitrite oxidation, which are concomitantly expressed during growth by ammonia oxidation to nitrate. Genesaffiliated with the phylogenetically distinct ammonia monooxygenase andhydroxylamine dehydrogenase genes of Nitrospira are present in many environments and were retrieved on Nitrospira-contigs in new metagenomes from engineered systems. These findings fundamentally change our picture of nitrification and point to completely nitrifying Nitrospira as key components of nitrogen-cycling microbial communities.
from
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5152751/
Also, as the abstract mentions, it was also discovered that there is another group oof mircroorganisms which can oxidize ammonia- they are Archaea. I know that De. Hovanec has these in his starter product in additions to the ammonia oxidizing bacteria.
The cycle and the way it works and the organisms involved have been a pet subject of mine for at least 20 years, I must have over 50 research papers on this bookmarked. If you would like about a month's worth of reading on this subject, i am happy to send you links to the papers.
I suspect much the same is true of fish keeping advice.
