Benificial Bacteria in the water column
 

I am trying to point out that there is very little beneficial bacteria in the water column. Does anyone have any decent links that would explain this?
Thanks.

This might be a good place to start:

https://www.advancedaquarist.com/2011/3/aafeature

Thank you. The person that was insisting that water changes significantly reduced the levels of beneficial bacteria in the aquarium used this article to "prove" her point.

Anyone know why that site isn't updated anymore?
I'm afraid its going to just disappear and there is TONS of valuable content on there..

Hopefully just a misunderstanding there on their part.. ;)
Nothing in that article proves a statement that partial water changes remove a significant part of "ALL" bacteria in a tank.. Maybe some clarification is needed..

Water changes obviously remove ALL (as significant as you can get) bacteria present in that captured/changed water.. Maybe thats all they meant.. :lmao:

The point that she was making, is that by doing a 25% or larger water change in a mature system, would deplete the "beneficial" bacteria in the system, resulting in catastrophe.

Yeah I hope most know that's simply not true..

...and the battle against anecdotal information continues :)

If this is true.. too bad we need to cycle the tank to cultivate beneficial bacteria everytime we do waterchange [emoji28]

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Ammonia-consuming and other filtering bacteria live mostly on the surface of rocks. You can test this by adding a UV filter to the system. They never cause ammonia spikes.

Bacteria is in sand and rocks and filters. Water itself does not have bacteria. It needs something to stick to.

#fake news.... move on :)

Very large water changes can cause problems by exposing live rock to air, and killing organisms on it. The decay can then cause an ammonia spike, if enough biomass is involved.

Any idea how long it would take before the bacteria would die off? When I do a water change, my upper rocks are exposed to air, but only for a couple of minutes.

It's not that instant. It take a long time exposure to kill bacteria. I know people that drain tank and clean glass and sand or rocks etc and then fill it back up with no issues. I know people that drain tank half way and expose corals and rock to air for 1 hr at a time to mimic low tide.
I would say over 2-3 hrs or more may start to cause some die off in bacteria. The major and instant die off would be the pods and normally they will jump around and find water.
If you are too worried about a little die off and have some ammonia build up, there are 2 things you can do.
1. Ammonia has to build up over 0.2 ppm NH3 which is about 1.5-2 ppm on TAN kits before it starts to hurt fish. I doubt a little exposure to air will cause that much die off.
2. Use a little prime with your water change just to be on safe side.

The bacteria die-off would be slow. Some organisms, like certain sponges, will die on contact with the air, though, and if there's enough decaying biomass, the tank can have a bad ammonia spike.