Reverse Respiration

[nabokovfan87]

On 8/22/2022 at 12:18 PM, Guppysnail said:

Yes. This is the “ph pruning” spoken of in the article. It keeps dead tissue from hanging about long enough to grow new algae. 

It might be a good focus as an addendum as to "why" this works well or is a preferred method.  I think a lot of hobbyists, myself included, struggle at identifying a plant literally trying to use dead material for nutrients but the outside might look "fine".  If we could talk to the plant, we'd have an idea of what needs it has and it's sort of like reading the tea leaves.  Even something like.... using it as a test for plant health, might be worth it if you're really struggling to figure out how a plant is doing.

Interesting stuff, for sure.

[Bev C]

Thanks everyone for liking my post even though I am having trouble with my older plants the new plants that i got and soaked with the seltzer water  is growing  even my willow moss .. and I kill moss in the past ..  I hope my guppy grass will continue to live   i bought it with the willow moss for my shrimp tank 

[Guppysnail]

On 8/22/2022 at 3:26 PM, nabokovfan87 said:

It might be a good focus as an addendum as to "why" this works well or is a preferred method.  I think a lot of hobbyists, myself included, struggle at identifying a plant literally trying to use dead material for nutrients but the outside might look "fine".  If we could talk to the plant, we'd have an idea of what needs it has and it's sort of like reading the tea leaves.  Even something like.... using it as a test for plant health, might be worth it if you're really struggling to figure out how a plant is doing.

Interesting stuff, for sure.

All of this is covered including microscope pictures in the article. When we could see reduced or no vascular activity is when ph pruning occurs. 
Pulling up plants to test how they are doing I would not recommend. Disturbing and potentially damaging roots can set back any actual healthy growth. So for that reason even pulling them to give them a boost what you get in boost is negated by the root disturbance. 
But yeah this was a crazy fun and interesting process to dig deep into, discover and learn about. 

[Guppysnail]

I have a new found appreciation for RR. I recently began keeping Scarlet badis. Very small mouths and require live food. I keep hydra because I find them fascinating and it’s easier to embrace what comes naturally to aquariums from live food. However daily micro live food with no time to stop feeding these to control the hydra…let’s say they are becoming boisterous.

I was trying to come up with ideas since adding fish that eat a lot of hydra is not an option. Of course Spixi snails came to mind but I wanted an alternative.  RR came to mind. It will be easy to rotate plants through RR  to remove excess hydra.  
 

Wanted to share for anyone in this situation or anyone that just has an unwanted hydra outbreak. It won’t eliminate it from the tank but it will help control the issue. 

Edited September 6, 2022 by Guppysnail

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

On 8/13/2022 at 3:57 PM, Chick-In-Of-TheSea said:

Since I was asked for another update. Ludwigia doesn’t look that great. 
 

 

The ludwigia no longer have that algae residue, so it appears the RR took care of all of that, and the algae I was seeing after the fact was dead as @Guppysnail suggested. However, they are still doing poorly due to the distance from the light in the 29 gallon.  I figured this out because at some point I planted one or two in the 10 gallon, and those are very happy and have made new leaves because the light is closer.  Hence, I've moved all the ludwigia to the 10 gallon where they can thrive. 

The nitrate level has been lower in the 10 gallon as well (it usually sits around 5 even with extra dosing of Easy Green. It just wants to level off at the 5 for some reason.)  The nitrates in the 29 gallon are usually 10-20ish, perhaps around 30-40 if it's water change day (every 7th day).  Therefore I ruled out that the poor growth was not caused by the nutrient level. Also both tanks have a little bit of potassium.

[Guppysnail]

On 9/9/2022 at 9:26 AM, Chick-In-Of-TheSea said:

The ludwigia no longer have that algae residue, so it appears the RR took care of all of that, and the algae I was seeing after the fact was dead as @Guppysnail suggested. However, they are still doing poorly due to the distance from the light in the 29 gallon.  I figured this out because at some point I planted one or two in the 10 gallon, and those are very happy and have made new leaves because the light is closer.  Hence, I've moved all the ludwigia to the 10 gallon where they can thrive. 

The nitrate level has been lower in the 10 gallon as well (it usually sits around 5 even with extra dosing of Easy Green. It just wants to level off at the 5 for some reason.)  The nitrates in the 29 gallon are usually 10-20ish, perhaps around 30-40 if it's water change day (every 7th day).  Therefore I ruled out that the poor growth was not caused by the nutrient level. Also both tanks have a little bit of potassium.

I used to suction cup my ludwiga to the wall higher up in my 29 and 40 and I also used pots to get height.  They thrived for me that way. 

[boylesdowntothis]

@Guppysnail this is a monumental work. quite incredible to see something like this on a public forum. this should be published formally. a zero toxicity pesticide and algicide will inevitably change this hobby at a historic level. i have more to say about your remarkable experiment but i'll start with "bravo"!

[Guppysnail]

On 9/10/2022 at 10:59 AM, boylesdowntothis said:

@Guppysnail this is a monumental work. quite incredible to see something like this on a public forum. this should be published formally. a zero toxicity pesticide and algicide will inevitably change this hobby at a historic level. i have more to say about your remarkable experiment but i'll start with "bravo"!

Thank you for the kind words. We appreciate it. We are hoping word of mouth spreads this so everyone has a safe go to method to use. Having it published has been spoken of. Just not sure we want that type of work. We also both prefer to not be in the spotlight quite that much. 
Maybe if @Irene has tried it yet she will do one of her fantastic videos on it. 

Edited September 10, 2022 by Guppysnail

[Bev C]

@Guppysnail Maybe instead of publish you could   do the word of mouth  message the Care/ AOC forum  administrator first to see if you could do it  ( i know there  are rules ) and see see if you could post a message to the members with the link  and ask to check it our and spread the word to everyone see maybe on the plant forum    there is many of us  here  .   I would be glad to post a link on my facebook personal page  i do not have a personal or  fish blog 

Maybe reach out  by email or messages to the popular   fish people  and aquarium plant people  community like on you tube and the different plant and fish blogs   plant shops and forums and even facebook and instagram  

have them check it out  and test it  out themselves ,,  

All they need to do is test it  to see it works ,, I just did a new soak yesterday on new plants  it killed all the snails and some of the plants looked awful  the roots leafs and yellow i pulled them out the leaf are bright green and the roots look much better 

 Maybe @Candi and @Ireneat AOC   has ideas ,,to get the word Honestly I thought of Irene and AOC Blog with this study this  would be up Irene’s  and the AOC Blog alley  it is their type of  video and blog subject and ai know Candi is all over the place with the fish community on youtube  chats 

I belong to two  aquarium pages on facebook for my state there is no club. i can message the administrator  everything has go through them first and give  them link  and see if I can share  to the members

I was wanting to let them know about  anyway  since it is awesome but was not sure if we could share or if a forum only thing 

My older plants  that i was having trouble are starting to show a little growth  after the soak  and i also played with the fertilizer dose too ,, But I have not seen any algae come back. (except for my glass lids ) that is a big bonus to me 

Edited September 10, 2022 by Bev C

[boylesdowntothis]

I’m new to this forum so I owe y'all a short explanation. I’m a chemist at JPL Pasadena although my work over the past few years has been to review works of colleagues before submission of their works for publication. Done many a review of papers similar to this one but for largely for scientific journals. Most are written on the popular science level as this is written but I commonly review works submitted for peer-level review as well.

@Guppysnail, @Odd Duck, @OnlyGenusCaps, @dasaltemelosguy, this article took me aback. I’ve never seen anything like this on a public forum. Bizarre, disparate, seemingly irrelevant assertions are made with even more bizarre analysis and proofs.

I could not help myself as old habits die hard, reading it end-to-end twice, and downloading all of your kindly supplied materials and even reworking many of your calculations. As I said, old habits die hard.

Your seemingly weird and 'out-there’ assertions often seem on the surface to be too abstract, to the point of irrelevance.

Yet it all works. Time and again I felt I found mistakes only to eventually see where you were taking it. It’s an astoundingly intuitive work.

Normally I would not speak in absolutes or similar eye catching terms but I’ll be blunt here for the sake of brevity. This is a monumental work. People, if I were doing a review of this work, I’d reference three moments in your discourse where I see genius level intuition in play. Something I’ve rarely encountered and even less frequently would feel compelled to suggest such:

 

• Using CO2 saturated water to asphyxiate the bugs while not harming the plants, and even potential growth stimulation, in lieu of poisons.

 

• Reversing the classic ph shifting process from alkaline > acid to acid > alkaline to dissolve algae cell cytoplasm instead of precipitating it, hence the white evaporate from the brown solution post-treatment.

 

• Discovery of photonic interference in the process predicting the darkness requirement and therefore increasing the probability it would exclusively take magnesium energy from the algae instead of the light energy, explaining it’s algicidal nature and the precipitate once evaporated. 

 

The asphyxiation concept speaks for itself. It’s the crux of the experiment and the literal solution to a chronic aquarist problem plaguing aquarists since I can remember.  We can finally stop using poison.

Reversing the ph shift to dissolve as opposed to precipitating the dissolved algae cytoplasm is so out of the box. I would have thought reversing it would have disabled the reaction. You predicted it simply changes if it dissolves or precipitates it, so long as no light is present. Bloody brilliant.

Perhaps it is my background but of all, I’m most dumbfounded by the photonic interference discovery. I saw that early in this thread, a few folks took issue with this but they clearly misunderstood it. As I understand it, you could not directly test what was in the solution after treatment so you reduced it to probability of what is most likely occurring with nuclear particle spin. I reran those calculations and it can only be magnesium and the only source could be the algae! Again, bloody brilliant.

I should wrap this up before I overstay my welcome but I may have never seen a document with this much inventive, esoteric, seemingly unrelated, disparate and downright weird data all pulled together into a cohesive whole with viable proofs for every concept. Equally impressive, that something of this magnitude was done by a team of only four people.

I repeat myself. This is a monumental work. A potentially historic work with the potential to transform the hobby. Why would we ever use POISON to clean plants or kill algae again?

My only criticism is this should be published here and where all of the hobby can benefit from it. In my opinion, Aquarium CO-OP has a literal discovery on it’s hands with this that has the potential to create an historic shift in this hobby. That is a very, very rare occurrence.

I have seen quality works published on other aquarium forums but the voices of ignorance inevitably shout them down. So kudos to Aquarium CO-OP for creating such an environment where something this esoteric can thrive.

I see a welcoming acceptance of new ideas with a refreshing sense of community here. Along with an active aversion to rudeness. Again, kudos to @Streetwise and the mods who maintain this level of civility and quality and for publishing works that are as genuinely new and controversial as this. Bloody brilliant you four. Bloody brilliant work indeed.

Congrats y’all. Joe

 

 

 

 

 

Sent from Mail for Windows

 

[Guppysnail]

@boylesdowntothis thank you for reviewing this and your kind words. The more folks that verify it’s validity through use and scientific examination the stronger this becomes. 
 

This entire thing was so much fun to do. We started with totally unrelated methods outside of they were chemical free. Seeing this from that stage to its growth and development into something so simple for even a day 1 aquarist to use safely was amazing. 
 

We are also grateful to have a place to share this where all the negativity and naysayers are kept at bay. If it were not for this safe learning space RR would have died due to our dislike of conflict. 
 

Welcome aboard and thank you for applying your scientific knowledge to help reinforce our data. 

Edited September 12, 2022 by Guppysnail

[modified lung]

On 9/12/2022 at 1:22 PM, boylesdowntothis said:

I saw that early in this thread, a few folks took issue with this but they clearly misunderstood it.

You're seeing responses to the first version of the article. There were some big updates to the writing that made what they were trying to say much clearer.

 

@Guppysnail @dasaltemelosguy @OnlyGenusCaps @Odd Duck

Congrats guys. Some possible legit approval here.

[xXInkedPhoenixX]

I'm going to try this on my 3 gallon extra plant tank which is infested with (beautiful) green hair algae and see what it does just for the heck of it!

[Guppysnail]

On 9/12/2022 at 5:19 PM, modified lung said:

You're seeing responses to the first version of the article. There were some big updates to the writing that made what they were trying to say much clearer.

 

@Guppysnail @dasaltemelosguy @OnlyGenusCaps @Odd Duck

Congrats guys. Some possible legit approval here.

Yes we did rewrite a few things to make them much more clear. And thanks to you we have some dynamite plant scope shots. 

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

What I like is that there is forum community involvement here in the testing.  Other posts will come up, and the "RR Team" will encourage those folks to try RR for Issue X and report back to this thread with the results.  (Issue X could be unwanted algae, sad plants, pest snails overrunning the tank, etc.  A number of things.)

RR solved an issue for me, and that was that I didn't know how to kill pests/algae on newly bought moss.  I was salt dipping my new plants, but I've read that it's not good for salt to touch the roots.  With moss, you can't exactly tell where the roots are or avoid them.  RR provides a solution.  A fizzy one.  🙂 

[Streetwise]

@boylesdowntothis, thanks for the moderation call-out, but this thread has not required any effort from us! I mostly block obvious spammers. Our members are pretty awesome.

[boylesdowntothis]

You’re more than welcome. I’m sure I’ve missed some things coming so late to the party. And I’ve seen many superb threads here already. I arrived on what looks like page thirteen ? so I may have missed answers or changes you’re all aware of. This one struck a chord for me as it’s analytical breadth is just profound. Especially the way you resolve multiple disciplines to a single core definition or conclusion. As much as I enjoyed it, it may be the immense complexity of the analysis that make it difficult for mainstream digestion. What a place this is. I can’t wait to dig around here more. Thanks to y’all.

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

Welcome to the forum @boylesdowntothis! 

[modified lung]

On 9/12/2022 at 3:38 PM, boylesdowntothis said:

As much as I enjoyed it, it may be the immense complexity of the analysis that make it difficult for mainstream digestion. 

Indeed, this is the thing I was trying to say early on. Although now that the description of the process was edited to be closer to the beginning, I don't think it's all that necessary to distill the rest down. Plus, there's now a good amount of examples in the comments people with my attention span can look at if they need more convincing.

[Odd Duck]

@boylesdowntothis So great to hear from others with expertise that confirms the true genius behind all this.  That is truly @dasaltemelosguy who did the really steep part of the research plus @Guppysnail’s keen and thoughtful powers of observation that brought in the questions and then more investigation about the plant boost effect.  I’m really just a fascinated bystander, proofreader, and made a single observation from a couple photos of some algae after most of the hard work was already done.

[Ken Burke]

I’ve said it before, but I think it bares saying again: I would love to see this as a peer reviewed article. 
 

I see applications far beyond The Hobby like removing invasive species like zebra muscles form equipment.  

[dasaltemelosguy]

On 9/13/2022 at 4:29 AM, Ken Burke said:

I’ve said it before, but I think it bares saying again: I would love to see this as a peer reviewed article. 
I see applications far beyond The Hobby like removing invasive species like zebra muscles form equipment.  

@Ken Burke you may be on to something. Ever since I saw your post, I’ve been looking for this study as it was buried in somewhere in my PDFs.

This is an open access document that anyone may view without a subscription. They tested oxygen deprivation via CO2 saturation as an extermination method for zebra mussels in particular (although they tested several invasive species).

What’s interesting is the percentage of mortality increases with CO2 pressure. In fact, the 24-hour treatment line is very linear, that is, mortality rises with CO2 pressure almost perfectly.

They tested it with normal to elevated pressure but if you extend the graph line, the red circle shows where the average seltzer pressure would be, and the blue circle is where it should reach 100% mortality of zebra mussels in seltzer. It seems to reach 100% mortality well before we even reach seltzer’s high pressure.

The filled, inverted triangles are a 96-hour treatment. Notice 96 hours of CO2 has 100% mortality at any pressure.

The filled squares are 24-hour treatments. It’s just an approximation but as it is so linear, it suggests 100% extermination of zebra mussels would be reached in under 22 hours in seltzer water.

I’m guessing but I imagine the high pressure in seltzer is in part why it killed the MTS when they escaped some other solutions. It seems to be too high in pressure for their natural protective devices or even for microcavities to resist.

While in the study they attribute all of their findings to anoxia, given what we’ve seen with the pressure, I would not be surprised to see it is also a major factor in their results, even if they are unaware.

This is just speculation as I’ve tested none if this, nor have I ever seen a zebra mussel! But I thought you might find it interesting that some labs are in fact testing exactly what you have been speaking about.

INVASIVES.net

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 13, 2022 by dasaltemelosguy
Forgot Link

[Ken Burke]

Sounds like one piece of lit review complete!

[clovenpine]

Did I just...*checks time*...yes, I definitely did just spend 2.5+hrs reading an aquarium forum post and 13 pages of comments and loved every minute of it. I can't remember the last time I was this excited or comforted about the potential of the internet.

Folks, this is amazing, groundbreaking work and kudos to you all. You should be proud of not just the science, but of the "science communication." I was able to read, understand, apply, and *enjoy* the entire write-up. That's incredible given the complex ideas and volume of data you were working with. 

Thanks for all your efforts, and I can't wait to try this "citizen science" experiment. 

[DebSills]

@clovenpine - me too!

I have clearly not been spending enough time on this forum of late (trying to get a kid into college is hard 😞 ) anyway, I was literally days away from scrapping everything in my 29g because its become completely overrun by BBA and I just can't deal with it at this point, I let it go too far and while the fish are thriving, its not making me want to deal with them, so I was just going to scrap it and start over. Now I have the chance to save at least some of my plants instead of throwing everything in the trash (there's a giant sword in there that I'm not keeping, but hope to save at least some of the stems and my crypts)...I'll definitely post before and after pics and see how everything works out! So excited I decided to figure out what the heck Reverse Respiration was!!