How exactly does Dr.Tims waste away and similar bacteria additives work?

[leonardomanzano]

From my understanding bacteria has to grow and be in contact with the object it needs to eat/break down

How are a few doses able to clear up your tank in the span of a few days? (in my case it was only 3 days)
does the bacteria populate the tank faster than nitrifying bacteria?

What kind of bacteria does Dr.Tims use? is there a specific family?

Will the bacteria remain in my tank after dosing or will it die off after some time due to the lack of food source?

 

[brandon429]

I recommend to not use it.

we can fix tanks using physical controls far better than waste away can fix problem tanks.

Waste Away: Is it really bacterial? Or chemical? What does it do?

[Edits for clarity - 4/21 - shown in brackets] I've been looking into debris that accumulates in the sand (Dan's Thread for that discussion) in our tanks and ways to "clean it up" whatever that means. In the process Waste Away by Dr Tim and similar "grunge-eating" products became of interest...

www.reef2reef.com

 

[taricha]

Since the above is my thread, let me add some nuance.

Waste Away, MicroBacter7, MB Clean, etc. are widely used, and mostly are considered effective by the hobbyists. Personally, I think that the effects are bigger than placebo, and the products do help in some way.

However, it is not exactly clear the mechanism. From the above thread - Waste Away contains a significant carbon dose. Measured by bacterial O2 consumption, it's 1/6th of the organic carbon of vodka, meaning a little more than vinegar. WA is dosed at 1ml/Gal and 1mL/Gal of vinegar would certainly be a moderate sized carbon dose, with effects that you'd notice.

Other products might have similarly important chemicals (carbon sources, enzymes, flocculants) in the media in the bottles that can cause relevant changes in aquaria even if the bacteria from the bottle didn't do much or activate at all.

At the time I wrote the thread above I wasn't even sure if Waste Away had any bacteria in it. It does.
Dr Tim has said it has Bacillus
"The bacteria are Bacillus - why do a PCR analysis? Send a sample to AquaBiomics and for $99 you'll have answer."

Sometimes under some amounts of food, the bacteria don't seem to activate

Figure 2: Skimmate diluted to 5% Inoculated with Waste Away, MicroBacter7, and Aquarium Water

All 3 markers, Oxygen, Ammonia, and pH tell us the same story again, now with two different products. The bottled bacteria aren't activated - indistinguishable from sterile control, and the same dose of aquarium water as the bottle product introduces bacteria that do all the things we'd expect.

other times, if the food level is rich enough, they do activate...

Figure 4: Frozen Food Cube 50 mg/L protein Inoculated with several raw or killed bacteria products, and Aquarium Water

Ooh boy! we asked for activity, and here we've got it by the buckets. Every replicate of every product came alive while the killed versions of the same products act just like blank controls. Even my old bottle of WA, that I was worried about, still perked up. All consumed O2, and all did....stuff to the ammonia reading. Digestion of Nitrogen-rich compounds could release excess N, and building biomass could consume N, so both are possible.
Total ammonia test chemistry reacts with ammonia and proteins and aminos, so the initial levels / controls are not really much ammonia - but interfering N in proteins etc. The increase of ammonia after digestion is real and almost all actually ammonia.

Notice that again the native aquarium bacteria were the most aggressive oxidizers of carbon - O2 in sealed tubes was fully depleted - and the largest producers of ammonia. (The 2nd WA sample looks nothing like any other bacterial product sample and looks a lot like Aq bacteria so lets think of it as likely contamination - oops.) Other than that, it's quite interesting how different the bottle product results look from the native Aq bacteria when presented with the same nutrients.

So bottled bacteria products absolutely contain viable bacteria that can grow. But so far we've seen growth on rich laboratory bacterial media and a fish food level of ~50mg/L protein - when I only feed an average of ~3mg/L protein to my tank on a daily basis. (And earlier 30mg/L of flake - 16mg/L protein showed no activity.)

It is very difficult to verify if the actual bacteria from the bottles activate, take up residence and become active members of the tank biome.

 

[brandon429]

the reason I don't recommend it is because we get about a hundred rip clean requests a year for tanks that tried using that doser and it didn't cut or reduce the target. occasionally someone will link that doser with a dinos die back but not very often, or it would be the staple item in the 600 page dinos thread. they struggle to get any patterned fixes regardless of the dinos method used/dino threads show, so I rate that doser above as .1% likely to help based on thread outcomes in my opinion.

 

[Garf]

the reason I don't recommend it is because we get about a hundred rip clean requests a year for tanks that tried using that doser and it didn't cut or reduce the target. occasionally someone will link that doser with a dinos die back but not very often, or it would be the staple item in the 600 page dinos thread. they struggle to get any patterned fixes regardless of the dinos method used/dino threads show, so I rate that doser above as .1% likely to help based on thread outcomes in my opinion.

Presumably you never hear from anyone that it does seem to work for though, right? That’s how confirmation bias works it’s evil ways, lol

 

[brandon429]

Its that I have spent obsessive time in forums for twenty years and have been watching what works and what doesn’t in pattern posts and that’s my take. If I thought it could be wielded to get the outcomes we get with deep cleans we wouldn’t be wasting six million gallons of tap water annually getting those means we would switch to it

I simply find nobody can use this doser to run a work thread centering around any particular invader or tank cleaning challenge


you can’t run this doser then move reefs without rinsing the sand for example, a subsection of those tanks would still die

and if you think they won’t, begin the thread we will know by page twenty

 

[Dan_P]

From my understanding bacteria has to grow and be in contact with the object it needs to eat/break down

How are a few doses able to clear up your tank in the span of a few days? (in my case it was only 3 days)
does the bacteria populate the tank faster than nitrifying bacteria?

What kind of bacteria does Dr.Tims use? is there a specific family?

Will the bacteria remain in my tank after dosing or will it die off after some time due to the lack of food source?

There really isn’t any scientific data on this subject. Possibly more myth than reason.

The vendors discovered that the hobby is nuts about the probiotic topic and they start coming out with all sorts of bacterial additives. These things seem to be in the “snake oil” category.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Since this is not an experimental thread, I'm going to move it to the main forum.