Quote:
Originally Posted by Reef Pilot
Thanks for your continued research efforts into the subject. It must be a fair bit of work and it is appreciated.
I am just reporting on my experience, and don't have any scientific back-up for what worked for me. But I did see some cause and effect, which is what convinced me.
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haha, I can't tell if I'm wasting time horribly when I should be concentrating on my actual research in grassland ecology, or being wise in taking advantage of unrestricted access to pretty much every academic article ever written while I'm still a registered student.
for what it's worth I'm getting sick of cyano myself. I'm trying to track down some Dr. Tim's Waste Away here in Canada, so while I might publicly espouse kermudgeony skepticism, it's a relatively low risk thing to try so long as you aren't expecting miracles. Unlike a lot of the things that get sold to people in the aquarium trade (or the 'alternative' health industry, fitness industry, etc. etc.), there is a theoretically plausible basis for hypothesizing that bacterial supplementation might actually have some of the claimed effects. My skepticism stems from the fact that
a) there's no "International Aquarium Claim Certification Board". These manufacturers can claim whatever they want, but it's not like they're held to any sort of standards or quality control. I'd be far less skeptical if even one of these manufacturers would publish the species they're using, and independently confirmed cell counts you could expect to be in each bottle the moment it leaves the production line.
b) Culturing, harvesting, purifying, and packaging a bacterial culture is not a simple process, and could conceivably range in sophistication from rotting some shrimp in a glass, shaking it up really hard, then straining the fluid in to a bottle, to a highly sophisticated industrial lab or anything in between. Process matters, and none of these companies publish how they go about producing their products
c) Lots can happen along the chain of custody, and while some put expiry dates on the bottles, I've not seen any that put 'packaged on' dates on the bottles to give you a sense of how long what you bought has been out in the world before it got to you.
and d) none of this has ever been studied in any controlled sort of way (though companies often claim that they've done 'rigorous' testing and we are supposed to just believe them), so while it's theoretically possible that it works, the microbial communities in tanks are likely as complicated and variable as the microbial communities in different people's intestines. When a company claims that their product 'maintains proper microbial balance' or some other biologically meaningless marketing language like that, they are implying that they have far more knowledge about marine microbiology than is is reflected in the scientific literature, both in terms of what the species they are supposedly selling actually do, and in terms of how those species interact with the microbes present in your tank. Yes there is some high level scientific theory to justify exploring the possibility, but considering that a recent study exploring the microbes present in human bellybuttons came up with dozens of microbial species that were as yet unknown to science (an area you'd think we'd be much more familiar with than the ocean or the unique circumstance of a reef tank), the chances are good that there are dozens to hundreds of species of microbe in your tank that are also as yet unknown to science. A company claiming that they know how a tincture of a few known species will react in an environment as complex, stochastic, and specific as any one tank vastly over-estimates the current state of human knowledge.
points a through d do not necessarily mean they don't do what they say they do, or don't have value, but they're good reasons to remain skeptical. As I said, if it works for you, keep doing it, and I'm about to try my own little anecdotal experiment as well because I don't really see a reason not to. Hopefully it works and my cyano vanishes completely. But I know there's too many variables, both inside my tank and in the wide world surrounding that product's production for me to either say it was the product that did it, or expect similar results in the future.
Bah. I have no idea what I'm talking about. What was this thread about again?