• You are viewing the forum as a Guest, please login (you can use your Facebook, Twitter, Google or Microsoft account to login) or register using this link: Log in or Sign Up

What exactly causes BBA? Part 2 - Bacterial imbalance

Potassium deficiency allows staghorn to colonize leaves. K deficiency also causes necrosis.
 
RE: Vitamin B12

One way to test the hypothesis is to add B12 directly into the aquarium. So if anyone has vitamin B12 supplements in their cupboard, adding a pill into the water can easily test this. What's the worst that can happen? A huge BBA outbreak of epic proportions? 😉
 
I suspect ammonia / urea would need to be present too. The triggers for outbreaks appear to be a poorly maintained tank / plants under stress AND a trigger leading to an ammonia spike. Heterotrophic doing well. Autotrophic suffering.

I can't pretend to understand all the science, but there appear to be two well understood mechanisms (the urea cycle and citric acid or LCA cycle) that organisms use to convert organic carbon molecules into increasingly complex molecules, leading to those required for algae to reproduce (search for methionine to spermicide), which ammonia / urea appears to be a key compound.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
So in addition to adding vitamin B12, relieve yourself into the aquarium to supply the urea. Who's willing to do this experiment?
 
Guest said:
Potassium deficiency allows staghorn to colonize leaves. K deficiency also causes necrosis.
Click to expand...

:thumbup: Thanks, ill keep an eye on it.... Never seen the brown necrotic spots on it as mainly discribed caused K deficiency on any plants. The mini Bolbitis just goes slowly black from the edges of its leaves and melts away. New leaves stay green till now, not show spots nor any necrotic growth, stay green in color but grows extremly slow, which is characteristic for this bolbitis..

My suspicion with soft water invironment goes down the drain in this topic i found. :arghh::nailbiting:
Black leaves on Bolbitis

Could be what you say 🙂 but other plants do not show any deficiencies at all. My tank is only running since april this year, so still maturing and developing.. I'll wait a while before to decide adding any extra's only for this little bugger and see how it develops the rest of the year. Can live without it, if it doesn't want to be in there while the rest is ok. 🙂 Got enough in there to make up for it..
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I'll consider doing this. I mean adding vitamin b12. I'll perhaps add too much fish food. Don't think the wife and kids would believe me if they caught me!

I'm about to upgrade, so I'd consider trying to create an outbreak.

I should be the one to test the argument.




Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Also, previous post should read:

(Search methionine to spermidine)

Not

... Spermicide)

Bl**dy spell checker!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Growing algae is actualy a growing industry for lots of purposes. Even red algae genus which BBA is, as staghorn also seems to be is cultivated for food industry.
I read articles where marine tank keepers want to grow particular red algae on rock because it's food for sertain tank inhabitants. They use a special algae fertilizer for it called F/2 fertilizer specialy developed by algae cultivator industries. I guess, whit an extensive search there must be a datasheet to be found with the contents of F/2 fertilizer or affiliates. Ive found already fert regimes to grow certain kind of beneficial algae just not the red one.. 🙂 but there are industries that grow them.


For the little bits i found about "Growing Algae" instead of preventing it.. It seems that red algae spieces also thrive on the blue light spectrum. That's why this algae is to find in deeper waters, because the blue light penetrates the deepest of all light colors.

Maybe we should also look at our light spectrums above our tanks. And take also this in consideration. 🙂 :spam:
 
In the What Exactly Causes BBA? thread, ourmanflint added a blue light filter and reported that the rate of algae growth reduced. When he removed the filter, it speeded up again.

In my Google searches, I found reference to the proteins in red algae and Cyanobacteria, responsible for capturing light - phycobillisome (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phycobilisome).

Also, Biocon labs made reference to autotrophic bacteria being more sensitive to blue/uv light.
 
Autotrophic bacteria thrive in filters, where there is no light - no night and day. I wondered if the nitrifying bacteria are carrying out a 24 hour process, converting ammonia to nitrates, keeping the ammonia concentration down. In which case, there will be a 24 hour demand for oxygen and bicarbonate (carbon dioxide dissolved in water or from limestone).

There have been several references to people running an airstone at night or running a lower level of CO2 24 hours a day.

I think ADA made reference to raising lily pipes at night to increase surface agitation and prevent oxygen being depleted. However, this would be for the benefit of the fish, crustaceans and plants using oxygen to respire over night.

However, increasing aeration may help to prevent oxygen depletion, which may help keep the autotrophic bacteria functioning and avoid an ammonia spike.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
AndyMcD said:
In the What Exactly Causes BBA? thread, ourmanflint added a blue light filter and reported that the rate of algae growth reduced. When he removed the filter, it speeded up again.

In my Google searches, I found reference to the proteins in red algae and Cyanobacteria, responsible for capturing light - phycobillisome (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phycobilisome).

Also, Biocon labs made reference to autotrophic bacteria being more sensitive to blue/uv light.
Click to expand...

The filter reduces overall light intensity, not just the blue spectra. Therefore, the conclusion that reducing blue spectra reduces algae cannot be determined because it's just as likely that reduced light intensity reduces algae.
 
Guest said:
So in addition to adding vitamin B12, relieve yourself into the aquarium to supply the urea. Who's willing to do this experiment?
Click to expand...

I've been dosing urea with great results, some plants really liked it. The downside is that if dosed too much, BBA started to appear. And that was a planted tank where growth, maintinance, dosing, CO2,... was excellent.
Never dosed vit. B12 though.

In the past i did use capsules with nitrifying bacteria in the substrate where BGA started to appear, with great succes.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
oviparous said:
I've been dosing urea with great results, some plants really liked it. The downside is that if dosed too much, BBA started to appear. And that was a planted tank where growth, maintinance, dosing, CO2,... was excellent.
Never dosed vit. B12 though.
Click to expand...

I'm suggesting that if you have a healthy population of nitrifying (autotrophic) bacteria in the aquarium, they will convert the urea to nitrates, which the plants will use for photosynthesis.

If you increased the dosage of urea suddenly, the autotrophic bacteria may be slow to respond (population doubling in 10+ hours) meaning an increase in urea concentration, as there isn't a big enough population to convert the excess urea.

However, if you hadn't maintained the tank well, a population of heterotrophic bacteria would have increased in size and begun to release the organic compounds they create and the algae needs to multiply, e.g. Vitamin B12.

Please don't dose vitamin B12.

I'm suggesting that both excess ammonia/urea and vitamin B12 are required, to cause a BBA outbreak.
 
Urea is dosed daily, as an alternative N source.
It's very difficult to calculate what the uptake of urea is, and how much (if any) gets converted by archaea and bacteria to ammonium, nitrite and nitrate.
 
You mentioned that if you increased the dose of urea, BBA seemed to appear.

I was just making the point that if you were to increase the dosage significantly, the nitrifying bacteria population may not respond quickly enough to prevent a temporary increase in the concentration of urea.

I'm proposing here that BBA requires a higher concentration of urea/ammonia as its nitrogen source, with other compounds such as vitamin B12 to create the compounds it needs to reproduce.

I'm suggesting that if you did want to increase the urea dosage, it should be done gradually. Aquarium cycling takes weeks as the nitrifying bacteria populations grow slowly.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Hi all,
AndyMcD said:
I'm proposing here that BBA requires a higher concentration of urea/ammonia as its nitrogen source, with other compounds such as vitamin B12 to create the compounds it needs to reproduce.
Click to expand...
I think there could be "legs" in this, but it is going to be very difficult to prove.

On the plus side :
On the less positive side:
  • We don't know exactly which specie(s) of Rhodophyta we have in the aquarium.
  • Audouinella spp. etc all show alternation of generation, and the gametophyte and sporophyte generations may be stimulated by different conditions.
  • Most Rhodophyta grew in very nutrient poor conditions (including the freshwater ones we have data for).
  • Most symbiotic, or mutualistic bacteria, are specialists rather than opportunists.
cheers Darrel
 
Darrel,

Thank you very much for replying that the argument MAY have legs. It's very much appreciated.

Also, I fully understand that it would be extremely difficult to prove definitively.

This is more of a theory, which I think helps to explain how the various reported triggers may fit together.

However, as you correctly point out, the actual species in our aquariums may differ significantly from those in the experiments.

This is based on scientific literature. I may continue to post information, as it may help others draw other conclusions.
 
dw1305 said:
Most symbiotic, or mutualistic bacteria, are specialists rather than opportunists.
Click to expand...
Darrel,

In the interests of scientific debate (hope you don't mind), I've found the following paper 'Isolation of Pseudomonas aeruginosa and other bacterial species from ornamental aquarium plants' http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC169867/.

In this paper, the scientists bought 92 aquatic plants from 33 shops in Canada, then tested them to see what heterotrophic bacteria they could find and how frequently they occurred (isolates).

I've compared this list with the list of heterotrophic bacteria known to produce vitamin B12 (on Wikipedia) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12

Of the 26 types of bacteria identified on the aquatic plants, 8 are on the list that produce vitamin B12 (31%).

However, of the 361 isolates measured from the aquatic plants, 230 isolated were from bacteria on the list that produce vitamin B12 (64%).

My point is that many of the types of the heterotrophic bacteria that are introduced into our aquariums (and possibly the more popular ones), exist to consume organic carbon molecules (and happen to create vitamin B12 as a by product).

Vitamin B12 production does not appear to be limited to a few specialist species.

The Wikipedia entry also states that Pseudomonas Denitrificans is used for the industrial production of Vitamin B12.

Andy
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top