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Bacteria in a bottle

I was having an interesting discussion yesterday with a salesman promoter or trader whichever you choose to call him.
It is about Probiotic and beneficial bacteria. He brought this up in a fish group and as usual being the vocal one, I told him I don't believe in things like this. He jumped to the conclusion that I meant I do not believes in the existent of bacteria which of coz not being the case here.

I meant I do not believe in buying bacteria or bacteria in a bottle. For me buying bacteria is like having to buy oxygen. Why do you need to pay for something that is free?

According to his logic, aquarium is a confine space that after awhile bacterias will perish and that is why we need to top up.

If I remember correctly, things tat I've been doing for decades, I cycle the new tank, throw in a few tiger barb and wait for midnight where an angel will come and pour in some bacterias into my tank and after a few weeks, walaa the tank is now officially cycled. God provides.

So I'm guessing times are difficult nowadays and God decides to remove subsequent bacteria subsidy. So we now need to digged out from our own pocket to purchase bacteria.

Think logically, if your bacteria perish from your tank it only means something is wrong in your setup. Otherwise why would your bacteria colony decides to quit on you?

Eg, If you are keeping 9pcs of arowanas and after a year they suddenly died all of them. Do you go to the lfs the next day and buy another 9pcs and throw them in? You don't do this... You start a csi investigation as to why all your arowana died on you. Is there no food that they died of starvation. Is the temperature too hot or too cold. Has the ph gone to caustic level. Same concept applies to your bacteria colony.

If you can't keep your bacteria alive it simply means something is wrong wit your system. Fix it!

Fish keeping is an art of keeping your fish to their most potential. You only need to keep your system stable and not overload your tank. Same thing goes for Bacteria.

Next he argued his Probiotic contains so and so bacteria. Ok honestly I know shit about bacteria types. I just ask him this: how do you know my fish is short of these bacteria? How many tanks culture test have you done to get your statistic on which is important and which is bad bacteria?
More importantly if my fish lacks this so called bacteria and your fish has them, what is the difference between our fishes? He answered me his will look better. Boy this remark make things really interesting. I showed him a few of my fishes that I've groom from young and asked him now show me yours.

He showed me an adult wild caught sp Borneo tat he had acquired recently and telling me how beautiful it was. I'm thinking hey no matter how beautiful tat wc fish is... You can't claim credit for things you did not do. You did not raised the fish from young you bought it as it is. The hell the fish could be more beautiful in the wild until you keep them.

Anyway back to the point, I dont add Probiotic to my fish because god provides. Bacteria needs a stable environment. You put more bacteria in your system and when there are not enough food, soon the bacteria dies. 

And those bacteria in a bottle, just how reliable are they? They could be contaminated or expired or mishandle. Those backyard manufacture bacteria are worse. We dont even know what the hell is inside them and I'm sure they themselves have no idea what is inside those bottles. It could possibly be dangerous to humans too. You need a serious lab to produce bacteria, certainly not in a kitchen.

So my advised to you all is, spend your money wisely. Of course you can purchase oxygen and breath them all in, feel good right. Or you can breath oxygen that god had provided, just like how people had been doing for the passed thousands of years.

Probiotic is the best money making product invented to suck your money. Perhaps there is used in special cases but definitely not in our tanks. Farm yes, they overload everything, they pump antibiotic frequently and overstock their ponds.

Beneficial bacteria on the other hand is free, just get some used healthy media from anywhere and throw into yr tank and u have a safe and sound bacteria colony. Why spend yr money on bacteria where u are unsure if they could be contaminated?

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  1. UnknownMay 23, 2021 at 1:47 PM

    I agree with this, as I see people who support bacteria in a bottle to have hypocritical thinking. If you say an aquarium is an enclose environment and need to be top-up, then wouldn't the bottle also be an enclosed environment? And of course to me bacteria in a bottle is a scam, because unless you open the bottle everyday and feed the bacteria inside, you wont have viable bacteria. I think what they actually sell is bacteria food i.e., ammonia and nitrite, which we can easily produce ourselves. These people very much don't understand the simplest of biophysics and most likely get their facts from "he said and she said" sources.

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