Ammonia processing rate of established tank?

[seabass]

24 minutes ago, 1891Bro said:

Even without going dormant wouldn't lack of food cause some bacterial die off that would generate ammonia for the living bacteria to continue feeding off of? 

That is a lucid, intelligent, well thought-out objection.

- Judge Chamberlain Haller, My Cousin Vinny (1992)

 

I suppose that might be true to some extent.  It would be a very small amount of ammonia compared to a typical bioload, and the populations would continue to dwindle.  I still feel that dormancy would be the primary factor in their survival.  But it's very hard to measure populations without examining samples under the microscope.

[brandon429]

food gets in the tank always, unless we are not at home and instead are reefing in a positive pressure microbiology lab.

 

its not if they get feed, but which part of the smorgasboard presents

here are food sources alternate:

 

millions of heterotrophic nonfiltration aerobes living and dying in sequence all part of the slime matrix. death equals ammonia production, water equals constant contamination, in out, with our environment. these aquaria exchange with their world, give and take.

 

ten thousand of your skin cells wafting

 

some spores, molds and fungi egon

 

myriad others, ranging home to home. likely much higher count in mine than others lol

 

when testing gets completed for fully unassisted dry substrate cycling, its those micro foodstuffs I think w cause the event after about 70-90 days. to generate their own biofilms from scratch, no ammonia, no bottle bac, will certainly indicate foodstuff avail or not.

[seabass]

Possibly.  However, in absence of nitrifying bacteria that oxidize ammonia (Nitrosomonas and Nitrosococcus), does a bucket of water produce any measurable amount of ammonia?  It gets pretty theoretical when you can't isolate the bacteria strains.  Maybe it's a bit of both (dormancy and ammonia byproducts from other microscopic life and organic contaminants).

[brandon429]

that's why this thread is awesome then, I can't imagine how ammonia from natural complements could be anything we could measure. somehow its enough, but I truly can't recall anyone simply doing a marine unassisted cycle and documenting it, nobody has the patience including me lol. it may take six months? Our friend at R2r on that sister thread w do one, we'll hear back long about December time I think on it

One thing I feel confident in extrapolating between the marine and freshwater worlds is that the 30 day freshwater version of the unassisted cycle is easily demonstrable with a handful of guppies, no testing needed. put them in day 1, cloudy death by day 5.

 

put them in after 30 days simple submersion, no cloud, get babies in 30 more days.

 

the marine and fw biota presentation from our environs is all mixed, and we'd expect marine fare to be less/agreed.

 

but I strongly think they each have their own linear curve that wont vary much across the planet...marine taking slightly longer? dunno

awaiting marine version outcomes.

[seabass]

I believe that you could find numerous articles which support dormancy.  I wouldn't rule it out.

• https://phys.org/news/2014-06-bacteria-dormancy-antibiotic-drugs.html
• https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00253-008-1712-y
• http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003EAEJA.....1003M

 

I didn't go through these articles in depth, and I'm sure there are much better examples which would be more pertinent to our discussion (there seems to much information about the dormancy stage of bacteria).  Sorry, too lazy to dig through the net to find them.

[Kerber13]

2 hours ago, 1891Bro said:

Even without going dormant wouldn't lack of food cause some bacterial die off that would generate ammonia for the living bacteria to continue feeding off of? 

If there is die off, though, would the bacteria be able to keep same rate of breaking down ammonia when these doses were added? (e.g. 1ppm/day)? From what I've read it seems it takes about 24 hours for the autotrophic bacteria (the bacteria primarily involved in the breakdown of ammonia and nitrites) to reproduce. In the cases we've seen above (save the 2ppm and 5ppm ammonia tests) the 1ppm of ammonia has been gone within 24 hours, so any new bacteria reproduced due to a proposed die off would have no hand in the breaking down process. I believe this would point more towards a state of dormancy? Let me know your thoughts!

[1891Bro]

15 minutes ago, Kerber13 said:

If there is die off, though, would the bacteria be able to keep same rate of breaking down ammonia when these doses were added? (e.g. 1ppm/day)? From what I've read it seems it takes about 24 hours for the autotrophic bacteria (the bacteria primarily involved in the breakdown of ammonia and nitrites) to reproduce. In the cases we've seen above (save the 2ppm and 5ppm ammonia tests) the 1ppm of ammonia has been gone within 24 hours, so any new bacteria reproduced due to a proposed die off would have no hand in the breaking down process. I believe this would point more towards a state of dormancy? Let me know your thoughts!

Lol. My outburst was more like a kid at the grown ups table. 

 

One way way or the other though, if you leave em wet they still get to work when you need em too. 

[brandon429]

To me it's best modeled by unassisted cycle testing, we can find links for many good details, the food tapping nature included and agreed it could be all or some part dormancy.

 

If we can bring up a set of rocks to full cycle within a few months adding only water, they didn't pass the digestion test at the end by being dormant

 

They had to be acquisitioners, opposite

 

Though in the state of well fed tank- to fallow test tank- some trigger for dormancy sounds better placed for sure. Can't wait to see oxidation testing for unassisted cycles on all sides of equation. Agreed dormancy=strong adaptation habit. Powerful bacteria thread building up.

[1891Bro]

2 hours ago, brandon429 said:

To me it's best modeled by unassisted cycle testing, we can find links for many good details, the food tapping nature included and agreed it could be all or some part dormancy.

 

If we can bring up a set of rocks to full cycle within a few months adding only water, they didn't pass the digestion test at the end by being dormant

 

They had to be acquisitioners, opposite

 

Though in the state of well fed tank- to fallow test tank- some trigger for dormancy sounds better placed for sure. Can't wait to see oxidation testing for unassisted cycles on all sides of equation. Agreed dormancy=strong adaptation habit. Powerful bacteria thread building up.

Ya know, really, y'all are talking about one of the most basic and, most ancient forms of life (on this planet but that's a whole nother topic  ) so it goes to reason that these are some sturdy mofos. Really, of all the evolved life on the planet these little ####ers have succeeded with just the single cell they got. There's so many threads concerned about killing them and stalling them, but if a giant meteor hit and it wiped out the entire human race, there'd prolly be some of that bottled bacteria you paid 11 bucks for at Petco strutting around like it owned the place. 

 

Shit, I keep butting in at the grown folks table. 

5 hours ago, seabass said:

That is a lucid, intelligent, well thought-out objection.

- Judge Chamberlain Haller, My Cousin Vinny (1992)

 

I suppose that might be true to some extent.  It would be a very small amount of ammonia compared to a typical bioload, and the populations would continue to dwindle.  I still feel that dormancy would be the primary factor in their survival.  But it's very hard to measure populations without examining samples under the microscope.

I keep rereading this and think you're poking fun at me damn it!

[seabass]

It wasn't meant as a slam.   Most of your posts are just more lighthearted.  Anyway, for some reason, all I could think of was that My Cousin Vinny scene.  I thought you'd get a kick out of it.

[1891Bro]

8 minutes ago, seabass said:

It wasn't meant as a slam.   Most of your posts are just more lighthearted.  Anyway, for some reason, all I could think of was that My Cousin Vinny scene.  I thought you'd get a kick out of it.

Yeah I didn't take it as one either. There you go taking me serious. I was 10 when that movie came out. I guess I'm gonna have to watch it sometime, just for some young Marisa Tomei if nothing else. 

[dandelion]

4 hours ago, 1891Bro said:

Ya know, really, y'all are talking about one of the most basic and, most ancient forms of life (on this planet but that's a whole nother topic  ) so it goes to reason that these are some sturdy mofos. Really, of all the evolved life on the planet these little ####ers have succeeded with just the single cell they got. There's so many threads concerned about killing them and stalling them, but if a giant meteor hit and it wiped out the entire human race, there'd prolly be some of that bottled bacteria you paid 11 bucks for at Petco strutting around like it owned the place. 

 

Shit, I keep butting in at the grown folks table. 

I keep rereading this and think you're poking fun at me damn it!

Your post reminded me of a professor in my microbiology diversity class in college. He once asked the class "where does bacteria not exist in this world?" And we messed with him by answering "in a can of food" "in the blood of a healthy animal" "in an environment so hot >187°C where ATP breaks down (ATP is the fundamental energy currency in life on earth)"

[dandelion]

I just received my seachem ammonia test kit. Let's repeat the experiment:

 

Day 0: dosed to ~5ppm

left: control 0ppm

middle: some other stuff I'm doing please ignore

right: test aquarium sample

[brandon429]

 it just dawned on me that it's amazing dormant bacteria incidentally dosed with ammonia are giving the ~ same turnaround digestion as a well-established tank not in dormancy

 

 I'm sure over time if any variations are showing such as maybe an extra day ramp up time to full zero then we have at least established minimum reanimation times.

 

These extremely clean no organic systems are so ideal for microbe testing

[brandon429]

 

 

I have the ultimate fallow test in my he-man box from 1984 or 6 not exactly sure. yet unmeasured, it would be bacterial knowledge gold.

 

its a snake-or man, the kind that squirts water out of his head when pressed. body is reservoir, it has water in its pump head still swishing around, from 1984, and I knew not to open it back up (recontaminate) when I discovered it still liquid several years ago

 

it should be taken to texas tech and extracted using aseptic technique then plated out for examination. I wonder if water was enough and whatever plastic leachates could occur in thirty years lol. one day, that w be the neatest test of them all. im trying to find the email for the microbiology dept right now...what if I get lucky and some tech answers already wearing a masters of the universe retro shirt; im in.

 

Food Safety & Microbiology

• Address

  Texas Tech University, 2500 Broadway, Lubbock, TX 79409

• Phone

  806.742.2011

 

 

[brandon429]

Edit on my microbe testing

 

prof says no thirty year old samples of anything allowed to be brought in externally by students, safety issue. So, back on the hunt 

 

if I google HPC testing of water, there's a few places online one can ship samples too, might try that 

[seabass]

On 8/31/2017 at 4:27 PM, seabass said:

I dosed 50 drops of DrTim's Ammonium Chloride per each bin, which gave me about 2 ppm ammonia in each bin...

This evening, I dosed another 50 drops of DrTim's Ammonium Chloride to one of the rock bins.  I have done absolutely nothing but top offs with RO/DI water since Sept 2017.  I want to see how well the nitrifying bacteria can perform after not having an ammonia source for over a year and a half.

[seabass]

Hmm, TBH, I thought the bacteria would come back to life quicker.  Apparently it was too long and most of it died.  Here's the test today:

 

[seabass]

Day 3:

Looking better.

 

I didn't test on day 4.

 

Day 5:

 

So it looks like it took a day for the dormant bacteria to wake up, but it is now processing fine.

 

[DSFIRSTSLTWATER]

That's really cool to see. I'm glad you stuck with it for us to see. That's neat how it "woke" back up.