Reverse Respiration

[JJenna]

On 1/31/2023 at 2:58 PM, Guppysnail said:

You can always tell him about RR

Oh I did!

[Cinnebuns]

@Guppysnailor anyone. I wanna make sure this works for snail eggs too. I'm taking before and after pics but I'm going to be doing this for staghorn algae, mini ramshorns and mini ramshorn eggs. 

[Cinnebuns]

Another question. Would you personally trust moving a plant from one tank with algae and snails to another tank without both after doing this process?

Another question. Would you personally trust moving a plant from one tank with algae and snails to another tank without both after doing this process?

[dasaltemelosguy]

Hi, @Cinnebuns ,

These are snail eggs before and after 30 minutes of RR. The top image is the untreated, live egg. That sole feature is the embryo. There's links to live videos of this inside of the article where you may see the embryo moving around the inside of the shell.

               

This egg saw 30 minutes of RR. In the videos you'll see it's motionless and dead. So far, we saw no hatching of eggs or insects after RR, treatments, even after months.   We also saw no bacteria survive but we didn't test this enough yet to be definitive.      

I hope this helps. 

 

Edited February 8, 2023 by dasaltemelosguy

[Cinnebuns]

On 2/8/2023 at 4:20 PM, dasaltemelosguy said:

Hi, @Cinnebuns ,

These are snail eggs before and after 30 minutes of RR. The top image is the untreated, live egg. That sole feature is the embryo. There's links to live videos of this inside of the article where you may see the embryo moving around the inside of the shell.

               

This egg saw 30 minutes of RR. In the videos you'll see it's motionless and dead. So far, we saw no hatching of eggs or insects after RR, treatments, even after months.   We also saw no bacteria survive but we didn't test this enough yet to be definitive.      

I hope this helps. 

 

Ty much it does!  I was wiping off eggs on the leaves and oh my I couldn't keep up!

[Guppysnail]

On 2/8/2023 at 4:50 PM, Cinnebuns said:

Would you personally trust moving a plant from one tank with algae and snails to another tank without both after doing this process?

Yes absolutely. I’ve done it. I moved hornwort from my balladeer snail tank covered in egg sacs, black beard algae and hair algae to a new set up tank after RR. 

Np bladder snails or algae ever appeared in the tank 

[Cinnebuns]

Am I risking the life of the plants if I keep them in way too long?  I'm super tired and wanna sleep but they have 1h left. I didn't expect to get this tired. I guess I could just float them in the tank for the night too but I don't have the energy to plant them all. 

[Cinnebuns]

Ok...FOR SCIENCE!!

Here's my data with RR. 

Here's before pics. I have had some staghorn algae creep in and out of my life a few times. Some changes knocked it back but ofc it comes back. I decided to RR this time for that and to cut down my mini ramshorn population. I'm not all hating of the mini ramshorns but I will say I MUCH MUCH prefer the regular ones. Mini stick something bad and are kinda ugly. Anyway, I did pull off any obvious snails and wiped down lots of the broad leaf plants for eggs. The leaves were absolutely covered in snail eggs!!  The smaller leaf plants I did not wipe down but did entirely with RR. 

Here's some before pics: 

This last one I tried to capture the eggs on the leaves. It was hard to take a pic of. 

 

I used 3 gallons of seltzer in a 5 gallon tank with almost every plant from my 29 gallon. (My poor cories and khulis were going crazy all day with nowhere to hide.) I let them sit for 8 hours. At that time I put them in. The tank to float to deal with later since I was tired and in pain. I did get a pic after taking them out of what the snail eggs looked like. 

Are these dead?  They def look different so probably?

This is what the algae looks like for now. I can get pics of it in the tank later. 

 

Remind me to update you more as you guys need. I plan to but likely will forget. Feel free to ping me. 

[OriginalRainbowfish]

@dasaltemelosguy @Guppysnail @OnlyGenusCaps Very Interesting. My goodness went thru most of 18 pages of comments but didn’t see my question or it was on one of the few pages that I missed.  Sorry if this is a repeat then.  Once the bottle of seltzer is open the pressure is pretty much equal right or at least after a few hours.  Yes much higher than normal amounts of atmospheric CO2 but couldn’t this be replicated with bottled CO2?  Why can’t the same thing be done with an airstone on a ten pound CO2 tank inserted directly into the tank with plants unwanted snails and algae.  Obviously fish, any sponge filters with wanted bacteria or snails removed.  Just blast and keep measuring pH until it reaches a very low pH, like 3.5. Google says that’s the pH of at least a few Seltzer waters.  Yes all of the bacteria or most of it in the gravel will succumb so replacement bacteria from another tank will need to be added. I haven’t tried it and I didn’t see where any of you had tried it either.  Or did I miss that?  Is it not possible to put enough CO2 into the water to get it close enough to an opened seltzer bottle? There are some obvious advantages to bombing the entire tank. The seltzer is a great way for adding new plants but a tank that needs help needs the whole tank treatment and that adds up to a lot of seltzer.  
Do you think this kills parasites too like Ich?  I saw the worm death images so figured it would easily kill any Camallanus worms. But Ich cysts might be tougher. And the dandy of them all Mycobacterium (TB). Tanks that are infected with Myco the suggestion is to just toss the plants destroy the fish, boil the gravel and start over.  Without that sort of treatment new fish added to the aquarium also come down with myco eventually.  That would be also worthy of an experiment.  

 

 

 

 

[nabokovfan87]

On 12/27/2022 at 8:42 PM, KittenFishMom said:

I have a bunch of duckweed/frogbit floating plants I want to treat. Any advice on how to submerge them?

quilting nylon mesh with a plate on it.

[KittenFishMom]

My normal duckweed made it through fine, but my nano duckweed slowly died and sank and got sucked into my sponge filters because it was so small. It took me a while to figure out why my cycle was getting weaker. You might want to float the plants in a bowl for several days after treatment to make sure they stay health. (I put mine in a zippered mesh bag with a bunch of stuff on top to keep them under water, but not get crushed.

[dasaltemelosguy]

Hi, @OriginalRainbowfish,welcome to the forum!

We did not test everything you cited but I’ll try to address your questions.

Bacteria

We did not test for antiseptic qualities aside from that we had seen no bacteria in the solutions after treatments. However, most of the soda companies have studied this in great detail. There are volumes of data on this but in brief, they found only two forms of bacteria that survived the pH of seltzer, an acetic acid based and a lactic acid-based species as well as some yeasts.

Bacteria_Control_in_Soft_Drink_Production (criticalprocess.com)

 

CO2 vs Pressure v Time

I believe @Andy's Fish Den, beginning on Page 15 in this thread tested something akin to what you’re describing by filling a sealed aquarium with CO2 and found it was not lethal to snails (please correct me if I’m relaying your findings incorrectly @Andy's Fish Den!).

I personally once used Perrier (pH=5.5) and it had no effect either.

I don’t think it will be possible to get the pH low enough without pressurization though. Pumping CO2 into the water can never exceed the atmospheric pressure of CO2 (pCO2), at least not for long. And as CO2 solubility is proportional to the atmospheric pCO2, it will be 1X without a pressurized container.

Unfortunately, as you won’t be able to infuse the tank with more than 1X pCO2 without first pressurizing it, that limits the solubility of CO2 in water and therefore limits the pH drop to about 5-6.

As an example, below is from a study performed at Rutgers’s University where they measured seltzer unopened at 17X atmospheric CO2 or 17X pCO2.  Once opened, over the course of several hours it reduces to 3.3X pCO2. Due to a variety of reasons, it more or less stays at 3.3X pCO2 for about 3-4 days.

 

Ich et al

There are many encysted parasites of course but insofar as ich is concerned, it’s survival in pH and CO2 levels has been not only been studied but in fact, exploited. You’d unfortunately need a subscription to read this entire study but there’s a summary available from the link. To try to summarize their findings:

Ich cannot survive/reproduce in a pH under 5.5, nor can it survive in an anoxic state. Ich requires at least 0.6 PPM of O2 in the water and there’s literally 0PPM of O2 in seltzer.

In fact, what’s really cool in this study below is they actually treated an entire lake full of carp for a massive ich outbreak simply by slowly reducing the pH! They very slowly (2 weeks) acclimated the fish to a pH of only 4. When the pH reached somewhere between 4-5, in just 1 hour, the ich stopped reproducing and became infertile!  

Effects of pH on free-living stages of a Nordic strain of the economically important freshwater fish parasite Ichthyophthirius multifiliis - ScienceDirect

BTW, ALL of these variables above assume no heat nor agitation so that can alter the data. Hope this helps.

[TheSwissAquarist]

On 2/12/2023 at 5:59 PM, dasaltemelosguy said:

fact, what’s really cool in this study below is they actually treated an entire lake full of carp for a massive ich outbreak simply by slowly reducing the pH! They very slowly (2 weeks) acclimated the fish to a pH of only 4. When the pH reached somewhere between 4-5, in just 1 hour, the ich stopped reproducing and became infertile

Something to keep in mind just in case…

[Andy's Fish Den]

On 2/12/2023 at 11:59 AM, dasaltemelosguy said:

Hi, @OriginalRainbowfish,welcome to the forum!

We did not test everything you cited but I’ll try to address your questions.

Bacteria

We did not test for antiseptic qualities aside from that we had seen no bacteria in the solutions after treatments. However, most of the soda companies have studied this in great detail. There are volumes of data on this but in brief, they found only two forms of bacteria that survived the pH of seltzer, an acetic acid based and a lactic acid-based species as well as some yeasts.

Bacteria_Control_in_Soft_Drink_Production (criticalprocess.com)

 

CO2 vs Pressure v Time

I believe @Andy's Fish Den, beginning on Page 15 in this thread tested something akin to what you’re describing by filling a sealed aquarium with CO2 and found it was not lethal to snails (please correct me if I’m relaying your findings incorrectly @Andy's Fish Den!).

I personally once used Perrier (pH=5.5) and it had no effect either.

I don’t think it will be possible to get the pH low enough without pressurization though. Pumping CO2 into the water can never exceed the atmospheric pressure of CO2 (pCO2), at least not for long. And as CO2 solubility is proportional to the atmospheric pCO2, it will be 1X without a pressurized container.

Unfortunately, as you won’t be able to infuse the tank with more than 1X pCO2 without first pressurizing it, that limits the solubility of CO2 in water and therefore limits the pH drop to about 5-6.

As an example, below is from a study performed at Rutgers’s University where they measured seltzer unopened at 17X atmospheric CO2 or 17X pCO2.  Once opened, over the course of several hours it reduces to 3.3X pCO2. Due to a variety of reasons, it more or less stays at 3.3X pCO2 for about 3-4 days.

 

Yes, you are correct in that by pumping a high volume of CO2 into an aquarium that I had covered in plastic (saran) wrap, I did not totally eradicate the snails in the tank. I believe it is because I could not pressurize it to "force" the co2 into the snails. I am sure that the small amount of air that was trapped between the water surface and the plastic wrap had enough oxygen that the snails could survive. 

[Theplatymaster]

@dasaltemelosguy@Guppysnail@Odd Duck

sorry if this has been answered before,

if what i have is flavored seltzer will that work as well?

Does this process boost plant growth with using C02?

is surface area on the C02 container important as it is on an aquarium?

 

 

[Guppysnail]

On 2/18/2023 at 7:39 PM, Theplatymaster said:

@dasaltemelosguy@Guppysnail@Odd Duck

sorry if this has been answered before,

if what i have is flavored seltzer will that work as well?

Does this process boost plant growth with using C02?

is surface area on the C02 container important as it is on an aquarium?

 

 

I have no idea what the flavor would cause. That is a technical @dasaltemelosguy question 

[Theplatymaster]

@GuppysnailDoes this process boost plant growth with using C02?

[Odd Duck]

On 2/18/2023 at 6:57 PM, Theplatymaster said:

@GuppysnailDoes this process boost plant growth with using C02?

It does seem to cause a temporary boost, but it also has a “trimming” effect if leaves are already sufficiently compromised.  Some have had significant melt but it appears to happen to already questionable leaves.  That said, Vallisneria may be a bit more sensitive than most plants. If you’re only worried about snails, planaria, hydra, and other pests, then you only need to treat about an hour.  If you’re worried about algae, then you need to treat longer and Vals may not do well with a full 12 hour treatment.  I’ve treated Val up to 6 hours with no issues, but 12 hours seems very hard on them.

I don’t know the answer on flavored seltzer but I think somebody used regular soda (was it Diet Coke?) and it worked for snails.  I don’t remember about algae. The big thing seems to be the combo of CO2 and pH differential that gets the algae.  Pests appear to succumb to the CO2 alone but pH may also play a part.

@dasaltemelosguy is the guy to answer this.  He did the bulk of the research and math/science behind it.  @Guppysnaildid most of the plant and algae growing.  I mostly just reviewed and proofread, tossed out a couple ideas.

[dasaltemelosguy]

Hi @Theplatymaster, @Odd Duck is spot on in every point. Except for the fact that she had much more influence on the development of RR than she knows! 

Initially we saw a treated hornwort explode with growth for several weeks after which it normalized. Both @Odd Duck and @Guppysnail have more experience with any growth stimulation from RR than I have.

What I can tell you is it seems that flavored seltzers are/can be a little more acidic, like pH=2.75 vs pH=3 (in regular seltzer) so aside from rinsing the flavoring off, it should be fine. I did many plants in lime flavored seltzer when the store had no plain in stock.

[Theplatymaster]

On 2/19/2023 at 11:07 AM, dasaltemelosguy said:

Initially we saw a treated hornwort explode with growth for several weeks after which it normalized.

i have some hornwort im trying to grow big, maybe i should try this...

[Theplatymaster]

@dasaltemelosguy@Odd Duck

would this method work for killing diseases like ick and bacteria?

im wondering for collecting some plants (invasive) from a local lake, but dont want to spread disease to my tank.

[Guppysnail]

On 2/19/2023 at 9:04 PM, Theplatymaster said:

@dasaltemelosguy@Odd Duck

would this method work for killing diseases like ick and bacteria?

im wondering for collecting some plants (invasive) from a local lake, but dont want to spread disease to my tank.

Yes. Nothing that needs oxygen can survive. Collect away. 😁

[Theplatymaster]

On 2/20/2023 at 7:07 AM, Guppysnail said:

Yes. Nothing that needs oxygen can survive. Collect away. 😁

but then wouldnt the plants produce oxygen, which the things this is trying to kill could utilize?

Edited February 20, 2023 by Theplatymaster

[Guppysnail]

On 2/20/2023 at 7:11 AM, Theplatymaster said:

but then wouldnt the plants produce oxygen, which the things this is trying to kill could utilize?

Plants go through periods each day where they breathe carbon dioxide and release oxygen. This is where the name Reverse Respiration came from. 

To add to that done long enough for days it indeed will kill plants. @dasaltemelosguy tested that part. 

[Theplatymaster]

On 2/20/2023 at 7:18 AM, Guppysnail said:

Plants go through periods each day where they breathe carbon dioxide and release oxygen. This is where the name Reverse Respiration came from. 

ah, so this is done in the dark, so the plant consumes oxygen and releases C02 creating a heavy C02 enviroment with extremely low oxygen,

so why does this kill algaes? algae is very similar to plants, and  its less demanding in its parameters then plants.