Prodibio BioDigest Likely Has No Effect On Ammonia Oxidation and Does Not Help with Waste Reduction

[mcgullen]

No positive results whatsoever.

I have repeated all model tank tests with same results.

I have used BioDigest as instructed on established aquariums and monitored their TAN, PO4 and NO3 levels, only to see no difference as compared to controls for 2 weeks.

Is there anyone who knows what BioDigest is actually supposed to do and how to test for such results?

 

[ReefLife_Guy]

No positive results whatsoever.

I have repeated all model tank tests with same results.

I have used BioDigest as instructed on established aquariums and monitored their TAN, PO4 and NO3 levels, only to see no difference as compared to controls for 2 weeks.

Is there anyone who knows what BioDigest is actually supposed to do and how to test for such results?

You shouldn’t trust any company’s proprietary blend of anything without supporting evidence that it does what they claim. It is not on the consumer to do the experiments to validate a companies product. I don’t even see an official website for this product. There is no FDA regulations for these products, they could literally sell you water in a bottle and say it will do anything and have no need to back up what they say.

I think this hobby is at a point where we should force companies to provide the evidence that their product works. Unless the technology is obviously well validated for the uses they are using them for, in which case I would only care to see quality control measures for the product.

For example, the technology that aquabiomics uses to analyze your tank’s “microbiome” is a well known, established, and valid method for sequencing-based bacterial analysis. The only thing I would expect as a consumer is some evidence that they are providing high quality data with appropriate QC and standards used. If they claimed using their product would do x, y, and z for your aquarium, well then at that point I would expect to see some preliminary data at minimum.

At this point I think if the company cannot provide simple evidence to support their claims (whether or not that evidence is their own) then you should just spend your money elsewhere.

 

[taricha]

Is there anyone who knows what BioDigest is actually supposed to do and how to test for such results?

So far, tests that simulate real world scenarios all failed to elicit beneficial responses clearly attributable to BioDigest.

I totally understand if you decide that under the scenarios you envision (established tanks) - it doesn't work for things people expect, and you'd like to move on.

But just because I think it's interesting let me point out a particular scenario/question that I think is worth talking about.
Let's talk about the case for prodibio as a cycling / tank starter bacteria.

2. Prodibio BioDigest Likely Doesn't Help with Ammonia Oxidation

One would have hoped that, even if BioDigest does not contain true nitrifying bacteria, at least its heterotrophic strains could still consume ammonia when rapidly multiplies.

Well, it didn't.

Prodibio BioDigest did not bring down ammonia in any of the three runs within 48 hours. Nor did BioDigest beat the control tank in any of the run. In the second run after 72 hours, both the control tank and the BioDigest tank became cloudy, with ammonia starting to drop. This suggests that external heterotrophic bacteria started to multiply and brought ammonia down.

But, as you note - in the bottle bacteria myth or fact thread Dr Reef found that a number of bacteria did not consume any ammonia until some fish food was added - then all of the previous non-responders did in fact consume ammonia. This was interpreted as these types being heterotrophic nitrifiers - needing some amount of carbon in order to process ammonia.
So there's a couple of interesting (to me, anyway) possibilities I can think of.
One is what you envision below: it was actually bacteria already present in the new cycling tanks that processed the ammonia, and maybe not clear that the bottled bacteria were needed, heterotrophs capable of doing this might be everywhere anyway.

I suspect this is what happened in @Dr. Reef study. When he added fish food and witnessed ammonia starting to drop in the BioDigest tank, it was probably some naturally occurring Bacillus strains that were already in the tank water doing the job.

This is plausible. I could not find in the Myth or Fact thread where the result with heterotroph nitrifiers was done using a no-bacteria-product control. So those other products may not have done it either. Could just be heterotroph contamination consuming the ammonia.

Another possibility is that the Myth or Fact thread conditions weren't quite replicated here. Namely, I think in that thread the tanks were bleached and restarted with new water, so the bottled bacteria had a better chance to show their stuff. I'm under the impression that you used tank water as the water you added prodibio to. So that wouldn't be quite the situation for a new dry rock start.


I wonder if you more tightly replicated the Myth or Fact setup and bleached/washed containers with new saltwater and dry sand and did ammonia + crushed fish food in tanks with 1) No added bacteria, vs 2) prodibio, vs 3) a popular tank starter heterotroph in separate containers, would the no bacteria actually do nothing to the ammonia (or are heterotropjh nitrifiers everywhere)? Would prodibio actually underperform other popular heterotroph tank starters?

 

[mcgullen]

You shouldn’t trust any company’s proprietary blend of anything without supporting evidence that it does what they claim. It is not on the consumer to do the experiments to validate a companies product. I don’t even see an official website for this product. There is no FDA regulations for these products, they could literally sell you water in a bottle and say it will do anything and have no need to back up what they say.

I think this hobby is at a point where we should force companies to provide the evidence that their product works. Unless the technology is obviously well validated for the uses they are using them for, in which case I would only care to see quality control measures for the product.

For example, the technology that aquabiomics uses to analyze your tank’s “microbiome” is a well known, established, and valid method for sequencing-based bacterial analysis. The only thing I would expect as a consumer is some evidence that they are providing high quality data with appropriate QC and standards used. If they claimed using their product would do x, y, and z for your aquarium, well then at that point I would expect to see some preliminary data at minimum.

At this point I think if the company cannot provide simple evidence to support their claims (whether or not that evidence is their own) then you should just spend your money elsewhere.

I am based in HK so don’t have easy access to Aquabiomics

I totally understand if you decide that under the scenarios you envision (established tanks) - it doesn't work for things people expect, and you'd like to move on.

But just because I think it's interesting let me point out a particular scenario/question that I think is worth talking about.
Let's talk about the case for prodibio as a cycling / tank starter bacteria.




But, as you note - in the bottle bacteria myth or fact thread Dr Reef found that a number of bacteria did not consume any ammonia until some fish food was added - then all of the previous non-responders did in fact consume ammonia. This was interpreted as these types being heterotrophic nitrifiers - needing some amount of carbon in order to process ammonia.
So there's a couple of interesting (to me, anyway) possibilities I can think of.
One is what you envision below: it was actually bacteria already present in the new cycling tanks that processed the ammonia, and maybe not clear that the bottled bacteria were needed, heterotrophs capable of doing this might be everywhere anyway.

This is plausible. I could not find in the Myth or Fact thread where the result with heterotroph nitrifiers was done using a no-bacteria-product control. So those other products may not have done it either. Could just be heterotroph contamination consuming the ammonia.

Another possibility is that the Myth or Fact thread conditions weren't quite replicated here. Namely, I think in that thread the tanks were bleached and restarted with new water, so the bottled bacteria had a better chance to show their stuff. I'm under the impression that you used tank water as the water you added prodibio to. So that wouldn't be quite the situation for a new dry rock start.


I wonder if you more tightly replicated the Myth or Fact setup and bleached/washed containers with new saltwater and dry sand and did ammonia + crushed fish food in tanks with 1) No added bacteria, vs 2) prodibio, vs 3) a popular tank starter heterotroph in separate containers, would the no bacteria actually do nothing to the ammonia (or are heterotropjh nitrifiers everywhere)? Would prodibio actually underperform other popular heterotroph tank starters?

Thanks for the suggestion!

I should point out that in my very first test, I tried to replicate what Dr Reef saw.

1. I used fresh RO water to simulate freshwater tanks BioDigest advertises as compatible with.

2. I did sterilize all tanks with ClO2 tablets. This was done for not just the first test but all subsequent tests. Also to remove the possibility of residual chlorine interfering with bacterial products, sterilized tanks were rinsed with RO water with Na2S2O3.

3. I used household brown sugar as carbon and not fish food in my first tests. Sucrose, ethanol and sodium acetate were used for subsequent freshwater and saltwater tests.

Ammonia never dropped in any test in BioDigest tanks with 0.5, 1, or 5ppm as initial concentration in a way that’s clearly attributable to BioDigest. Ammonia only dropped when both experiment and control tanks started to show bacterial bloom after 48 hours that were likely to be caused by bacterial source not related to BioDigest. In other words, experiment results do NOT support a claim that the concentrated strains in BioDigest would give experiment tanks a head start.

In light of the above, is there anything else that I should try?

Thanks.

 

[taricha]

Thanks for the suggestion!

I should point out that in my very first test, I tried to replicate what Dr Reef saw.

1. I used fresh RO water to simulate freshwater tanks BioDigest advertises as compatible with.

2. I did sterilize all tanks with ClO2 tablets. This was done for not just the first test but all subsequent tests. Also to remove the possibility of residual chlorine interfering with bacterial products, sterilized tanks were rinsed with RO water with Na2S2O3.

3. I used household brown sugar as carbon and not fish food in my first tests. Sucrose, ethanol and sodium acetate were used for subsequent freshwater and saltwater tests.

Ammonia never dropped in any test in BioDigest tanks with 0.5, 1, or 5ppm as initial concentration in a way that’s clearly attributable to BioDigest. Ammonia only dropped when both experiment and control tanks started to show bacterial bloom after 48 hours that were likely to be caused by bacterial source not related to BioDigest. In other words, experiment results do NOT support a claim that the concentrated strains in BioDigest would give experiment tanks a head start.

In light of the above, is there anything else that I should try?

Thanks.

Thanks. Very much appreciate the detail.
This discussion makes me wonder if there's a real possibility that several "instant cycle" heterotroph products may be benefitting from random contamination that is unavoidable, and their product may activate and simply participate along with the bacteria everpresent in the environment - not necessarily be the primary driver of the heterotrophic ammonia processing.
But back to prodibio...

a google scholar for pseudomonas in aquaculture is a good way to figure out what somebody might hope their bacterial product can do. Mostly the game these papers are playing is to find some strains that show up in high nutrient aquaculture water, and measure their abilities to lower ammonia, nitrite, nitrate when fed different amounts and sources of carbon. What makes them desirable or interesting is that presumably they can remove a higher amount of these N sources than random other bacteria given the same C/N ratio.

You found pseudomonas in the bottle, so lets presume that prodibio is not finding some super obscure never-before studied strain, and culturing it en masse. They are probably using some strain that is studied and has been demonstrated to culture up and be salt/fresh tolerant.

If I were really motivated to try to see the psuedomonas in prodibio do something that might be relevant, I'd set up a side by side with two replicates of new salt water, and two replicates of new saltwater with prodibio. I'd add 50 mg/L of crushed fish flake ( at ~50% protein = 4ppm Nitrogen) to each and aerate each of them and track the ammonia over a week.

In theory there should be differences in the trend of ammonia over time vs the two treatments - if the prodibio is doing something - with a lower stable ammonia level after one week.

 

[mcgullen]

Thanks. Very much appreciate the detail.
This discussion makes me wonder if there's a real possibility that several "instant cycle" heterotroph products may be benefitting from random contamination that is unavoidable, and their product may activate and simply participate along with the bacteria everpresent in the environment - not necessarily be the primary driver of the heterotrophic ammonia processing.
But back to prodibio...

a google scholar for pseudomonas in aquaculture is a good way to figure out what somebody might hope their bacterial product can do. Mostly the game these papers are playing is to find some strains that show up in high nutrient aquaculture water, and measure their abilities to lower ammonia, nitrite, nitrate when fed different amounts and sources of carbon. What makes them desirable or interesting is that presumably they can remove a higher amount of these N sources than random other bacteria given the same C/N ratio.

You found pseudomonas in the bottle, so lets presume that prodibio is not finding some super obscure never-before studied strain, and culturing it en masse. They are probably using some strain that is studied and has been demonstrated to culture up and be salt/fresh tolerant.

If I were really motivated to try to see the psuedomonas in prodibio do something that might be relevant, I'd set up a side by side with two replicates of new salt water, and two replicates of new saltwater with prodibio. I'd add 50 mg/L of crushed fish flake ( at ~50% protein = 4ppm Nitrogen) to each and aerate each of them and track the ammonia over a week.

In theory there should be differences in the trend of ammonia over time vs the two treatments - if the prodibio is doing something - with a lower stable ammonia level after one week.

The control tanks showed bacterial bloom hours before Prodibio tank did on day 3 and control tanks’ ammonia level dropped rapidly..