The importance of the aquarium biome

[Art]

There's a lot of talk on the saltwater side about the aquarium biome. They are making reference to all of the microscopic life that exists in some sort of balance in an aquarium. The idea is that it takes time for this biome to grow and to balance out. In the meantime, you have the "new tank syndrome" and you're exposed to algae and poor growth due to the instability.

In my experience, it really has taken tanks, even high tech ones, time to settle in. Until I reach that point, I'm constantly battling algae. It's the ugly stage. After I reach that point, algae seems to be much easier to manage.

There may be some truth to this in the freshwater side too.

What do you think?

 

[ayman.roshdy]

In my two years experience which is not a lot; stabilizing the tank was always a pure chance, in some tanks everything stabilized in a few days or a couple of weeks without much effort, in others I gave the time and effort needed and things went very ugly, although I am the same person and using the same techniques. So far I can't tell for sure what is the reason, for example I had a tank with no maintenance for months and algae never came near this tank, in another I was doing weekly maintenance and water changes and algae invaded it that caused me to destroy everything and rebuild from scratch, in other words on this tank I completely lost my battle to algae, algae was every where, on the hardscape, the glass, the plants and it was completely useless to try to fix it and it was a very good indication that the tank is not stabilized at all

Bottom line for me, with regular maintenance things should be better, and with regular maintenance I mean daily ones; where I divided the maintenance tasks on like 6 days per week; 1 day for the glass, 1 day for the gravel, 1 day for the hardscape .... etc. but in some cases no maintenance at all works as well, and I believe we see this a lot in biotope tanks

 

[Art]

I think most of us have some similar experiences to share. Sometimes, you just can't put your finger on what's causing an issue.

I guess the difference is that experienced folks accept this fact and keep at it until they solve the problem. Someone with less experience is more apt to throw in the towel.

That being said, I am now much more open to accepting that I really don't know everything that is happening inside my aquarium. It's an ecosystem that is developing and maturing. A lot of it is happening at the microscopic level. The importance of the unseen world is becoming better understood and I think we will learn its role in aquariums soon.