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Originally Posted by reefkprZ  |  | | | | | | | | | I think I misspoke when i said dynamics of bacteria diminishes.
I wasnt implying that bacterial numbers diminish, as you said the numbers wax and wane due to available nutrients. I was trying to say that possibly diversification diminishes, out of 24,000 (random number) strains of bacteria in one tank after say two years the strongest 20,000 will still be there while the weakest 4,000 will have died out being overtaken by the stronger strains. a DSb in a reef will of course take longer to mature as it has more surface area overall to colonize as well as differing environments. same thing with microfauna say, tiger amphipods, they corner an ceartain ecological nich in our tanks a weaker amphipod introduced at the same time may compete for a while but due to standard fluctuations in our tanks as well as competition from the tiger amphipods ends up dying out completly.
IE say in a fish tank you put two gold fish (bacterial strain a) and two guppies (bacterial strain b). at first neither really dominates but the goldfish being hardier has a better chance at survival, while the guppies can out breed the goldfish. eventually the gold fish may be the only fish in the tank due to its ability to outgrow and consume the guppy no matter how many babies it has. see what I'm saying.
or am i way off base here, and bacterial strains keep diversifying over time? (this is the type of info I am really looking for) | |  | |  | |
Without addition, the bacterial strains are not going to keep diversifying over time since what is present is related to the additions made, i.e. bacteria aren't going to spontaneously form. But the bacterial diversification is immense to begin with and the different ecological niches within a reef tanks are diverse. Each niche will probably have, in general, a dominate strain that would take over, however bacterial interrelationships are possible. You can have large communities of diverse bacterial living in harmony/equilibrium within a single niche. These communities would be so interrelated that individual strain extinction would not occur without crashing the whole community, DSB's communities immediately come to mind.
Individual bacterial species can enter stationary phase also and can exist in this non-replicative state for years. Take cynanobacteria for example. Most tanks undergo a cynanobacterial outbreak at some point and then it resolves. Did the bacteria die completely? the answer is NO. If you were to add sugar to even the most mature tank that has not seen any cyanobacteria for years, you would almost certainly get a re-amplification of cynanobacterial numbers immediately.
When you say that bacterial species will die off and that is bad (hope I am interpreting your thoughts properly here) the key question is: bad for whom or what? In terms of total bacterial influence on the entire ecosystem's nutrient recycling it doesn't matter, since most Facultative anaerobic bacteria can utilize carbon, convert nitrate to nitrogen anaerobically, and can live aerobically to convert ammonia stepwise to nitrate. They have the enzymes to perform all these metabolic functions, Pseudomonas and Mycobacteria are two such genus .
Other bacteria are "farmed" by SPS, attached to SPS mucus, and consumed for energy. Their numbers would be lineally equal to the SPS mass.
SPS symbiotic bacteria will be so isolated within their niche that they would only die off if the living coral host dies.