waterdrop
Enthusiastic "Re-Beginner"
One of the issues I see is that in a fishless cycle, we test for nitrite(NO2) as feedback that the first "A-Bac" (ammonia oxidizing bacteria (Nitrosomonas spp.)) population is growing. We test for nitrate(NO3) as feedback that the second "N-Bac" (nitrite oxidizing bacteria (Nitrospira spp.)) is growing. What I think KK is getting at and what has happened to me a fair amount too in helping beginners is that some of these bottled bacteria products seem to just directly put NO2 and NO3 in the water, thus leading to false positive test results for a fairly long period of the fishless cycle.
The dream of packaging and reviving living bacteria for use at a targeted later point in time is based on correct knowledge by bacteriologists (as far as I know, based on at least one paper) that our particular two species are among those that can form spores and later come out of the spore state. The problem seems to be that so far, just about all we ever see is the bottle contents behaving as if dead organic material and intented nourishment substances are coming out but never evidence that the bacteria are reviving.
I think that getting the bacteria to revive is a very hard problem in itself and I'm not aware of Hovanec or anyone else ever publishing on this topic. Instead, all anecdotal evidence seems to show organics going up, bacterial blooms (heterotrophs) sometimes following and very delayed spikes in ammonia eventually happening as if fairly large bunches of flake food or simply organic mulch had been dumped in. The problem then with the cycling process is that the carefully tended dosing regimen is upset, leading to typical over and underdosing problems (and again, I have to repeat that discussing this is necessarily general because I do feel the different products are pretty different from each other, not just always having bad effects but sometimes just no effect.)
I guess I'm agreeing with KK in that even though sometimes the fishless cycle appears to proceed just as if you were doing a normal ammonia fishless cycle (with the usual 1 to 2.5 month time period) there are other times when the bottled bacteria substances seem to create many weeks of confusion finally culminating is what feels like a fresh start of some sort and a subsequent normal ammonia fishless cycle (or, more often, the beginner gives up at some point during this, switches to a fish-in cycle and either loses some fish or changes a lot of water and sees no symptoms.)
Similar to KK, I've pretty much watched hundreds of these fishless cycling threads in the last few years and it's frustrating to watch one of these that gets in to a sort of double delay. I guess to add to the non-scientific mess of it all we are not good at all about cataloging which BBs (bottled bacterias) do what - we keep no tally, adding to our own blame in not being able to describe it more clearly. (Perhaps BTT will comment that he and MW and I remember a time about 3 years ago when there were a different set of BBs about that we saw some different observations of, but that's a different story from now I think.)
WD
The dream of packaging and reviving living bacteria for use at a targeted later point in time is based on correct knowledge by bacteriologists (as far as I know, based on at least one paper) that our particular two species are among those that can form spores and later come out of the spore state. The problem seems to be that so far, just about all we ever see is the bottle contents behaving as if dead organic material and intented nourishment substances are coming out but never evidence that the bacteria are reviving.
I think that getting the bacteria to revive is a very hard problem in itself and I'm not aware of Hovanec or anyone else ever publishing on this topic. Instead, all anecdotal evidence seems to show organics going up, bacterial blooms (heterotrophs) sometimes following and very delayed spikes in ammonia eventually happening as if fairly large bunches of flake food or simply organic mulch had been dumped in. The problem then with the cycling process is that the carefully tended dosing regimen is upset, leading to typical over and underdosing problems (and again, I have to repeat that discussing this is necessarily general because I do feel the different products are pretty different from each other, not just always having bad effects but sometimes just no effect.)
I guess I'm agreeing with KK in that even though sometimes the fishless cycle appears to proceed just as if you were doing a normal ammonia fishless cycle (with the usual 1 to 2.5 month time period) there are other times when the bottled bacteria substances seem to create many weeks of confusion finally culminating is what feels like a fresh start of some sort and a subsequent normal ammonia fishless cycle (or, more often, the beginner gives up at some point during this, switches to a fish-in cycle and either loses some fish or changes a lot of water and sees no symptoms.)
Similar to KK, I've pretty much watched hundreds of these fishless cycling threads in the last few years and it's frustrating to watch one of these that gets in to a sort of double delay. I guess to add to the non-scientific mess of it all we are not good at all about cataloging which BBs (bottled bacterias) do what - we keep no tally, adding to our own blame in not being able to describe it more clearly. (Perhaps BTT will comment that he and MW and I remember a time about 3 years ago when there were a different set of BBs about that we saw some different observations of, but that's a different story from now I think.)
WD
/www.timhovanec.com/Publications/page7/assets/hovanec_patent_US6268154.pdf
) BTT.
)
