- Joined
- Sep 21, 2018
- Messages
- 6,796
- Reaction score
- 7,274
We are on the same page here. I regard the aquarium a waste management hobbyThe reason why sewage treatment keeps coming back up is because many of the bacterial strains in the hobby were "borrowed" from waste water treatment facilities.
An aquarium is in essence a closed loop Waste water system.
My point is that we need to use analogy with care, maybe more than we have to this point. The complex mixing characteristics of an aquarium make it a very difficult system to understand and study. And we are not typically equipped to see or measure what is happening at the biofilm level of aquarium surfaces which may contain the lion’s share of bacteria metabolism. We must infer from measurements of just a few chemical species in the water or the barely visible microorganism films on a surface what is happening at the sub-millimeter scale.