So Is This The Bacteria?

[CKutz]

I moved back home for the summer from school. this means moving my 10 gal tank back home. to do this i put the fish and the filter pads in a bucket of tank water.

the tank water got disgusting, with brownish particulate everywhere. i know you're supposed to rinse your pad out monthly, and i'll admit i never do this..so is this a build up of waste and things..or is this stuff my beneficial bacteria and i should add it back to my tank when i set it up.
my pads are all almost spotless now, so i'm worried it's my bacteria. however there is sooo much of it that it seems impossible. i had it in a bag in my "home tank" (my 30 gal.) and there is like 1/2" of brownish gunk in the bottom of the bag.

thanks a lot!

 

[fatheadminnow]

Hey Ckutz, lucky you are home from college! I go home next Tuesday, so not too much longer.

Anyways.

The brownish particle is just the debris that has falling off of the pad when bouncing around in the tank water in the bucket.

Your Beneficial bacteria have Bio-Films all over/inside the filter pads and are very well connected to your filter media.

Unless you like scrub the pads and squeeze them a lot, you are not really going to loose any bacteria.

Like you said, you never cleaned your filter pad, well, now you can consider it cleaned!

EDIT: Filter 'gunk' does hold some beneficial bacteria, but nothing significant.

-FHM

 

[CKutz]

alright thanks a lot

didn't want to have to go through a cycle or something.

 

[fatheadminnow]

alright thanks a lot

didn't want to have to go through a cycle or something.

Yeah, you will be all good!

-FHM

 

[waterdrop]

Alright you college guys, the sooner you go home the sooner us college townies can enjoy a few weeks of peace and quiet!

Couple of things here:
Filter Cleaning and Gravel Vaccing are in some respects very similar things and they are both important maintenance habits that differentiate long-running healthy aquariums from ones that eventually develop problems I think. In typical beginner non-heavily-planted tanks where the artificial ecosystem is a degree less "natural" than say, a heavily planted tank, both these types of maintenance take on an added degree of importance. Not cleaning your filter or not keeping up with your gravel cleaning aggressively in these types of tanks can eventually expose you to spikes of ammonia that can occur when excess debris gets loose and the heterotrophic bacteria have a field day, providing more food than the autotrophic bacteria can handle, even with a mature biofilter. Lack of these types of maintenance can also mean buildups of nitrate(NO3) and other substances. Different species of fish will have different tolerances to this type of neglect.

On a different topic, its interesting to ask whether one would find nitrosomonas and nitrospira as much on the "brown crud" as on the biomedia surfaces. Its not clear how much a single bacterium could differentiate between, say, a sponge surface versus the surface of a particular bit of debris. I suspect there's lots of bacteria intermingled with the debris. In fact, a significant amount of the debris itself will be broken off biofilms, which are loaded with bacterial cells of course. But what saves us is that in a mature colony, there will be a large enough "core" colony established on all the more permanent surfaces, like the sponge structures, that we can be confident that even if we "wring out" our sponge, our "beneficial bacteria" will still be "intact." On the lighter colored types of media one can actually see what is supposedly the bacteria and/or biofilm directly as a brown to black stain on the surface, that in quite unlike the loose brown mud of typical filter debris.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[fatheadminnow]

Alright you college guys, the sooner you go home the sooner us college townies can enjoy a few weeks of peace and quiet!

~~waterdrop~~

Hey now!

WD

-FHM

 

[CKutz]

haha waterdrop, my school is in chester, PA..if it had a higher population it would be counted as the most dangerous city in the US highest murder rate and such.
i don't think it will be any better off with me not there haha

i hope your local college students aren't bothering you too much haha

ok..i promise i'll keep up on my maintenance better

but i do gravel vacc. regularly..i've always just been afraid to mess with my filters. my tank is ten gallons, so i'm alwasy thinking of how people say little things can make a big difference in a small tank. so i'm always worried i'll upset the bacteria or something..and as long as it's flowing well, i don't bother it. but if that brown gunky stuff isn't anything very beneficial then i'll gently rinse it..once a month? or every week? or every two weeks?

 

[fatheadminnow]

haha waterdrop, my school is in chester, PA..if it had a higher population it would be counted as the most dangerous city in the US highest murder rate and such.
i don't think it will be any better off with me not there haha

i hope your local college students aren't bothering you too much haha

ok..i promise i'll keep up on my maintenance better

but i do gravel vacc. regularly..i've always just been afraid to mess with my filters. my tank is ten gallons, so i'm alwasy thinking of how people say little things can make a big difference in a small tank. so i'm always worried i'll upset the bacteria or something..and as long as it's flowing well, i don't bother it. but if that brown gunky stuff isn't anything very beneficial then i'll gently rinse it..once a month? or every week? or every two weeks?

Once a month is when you want to rinse out the filter media.

Just siphon like a gallon of water out in a bucket, and then just throw all of the filter media in the bucket with the tank water.

Then, just swish it around a little in the bucket of tank water, slowly getting all of the debris off.

You should be just fine Ckutz.

If you do it like that, you shouldn't have any Ammonia or Nitrite spikes.

-FHM

 

[waterdrop]

haha waterdrop, my school is in chester, PA..if it had a higher population it would be counted as the most dangerous city in the US highest murder rate and such.
i don't think it will be any better off with me not there haha

i hope your local college students aren't bothering you too much haha

ok..i promise i'll keep up on my maintenance better

but i do gravel vacc. regularly..i've always just been afraid to mess with my filters. my tank is ten gallons, so i'm alwasy thinking of how people say little things can make a big difference in a small tank. so i'm always worried i'll upset the bacteria or something..and as long as it's flowing well, i don't bother it. but if that brown gunky stuff isn't anything very beneficial then i'll gently rinse it..once a month? or every week? or every two weeks?

chester eh? I used to be just off the grounds of Swarthmore, right near there I think, we probably rode the same line into philly, lol.

yes, I can understand your (fairly wise) thinking, not disturbing is a good habit during cycling... but eventually I guarantee that probably one of two things would happen: either the filter would clog up and the flow would slow down, which is not good in a number of ways.. or one day you would notice clouds of debris seeming to float in the tank - this being when the filter as filled up with debris and is now allowing some of it to go back out into the tank!

~~waterdrop~~

 

[CKutz]

wow small world!
yea i used to take the train from the chester transportation center into philly. or drive on 95.

alright thanks a lot for the help guys.