The best skimming we can do is by removing water borne bacteria that have bound nutrients and whatever stage in the cycle, this is helpful.
In nature 98% of the bacteria is water borne and around 2% on surfaces. In our aquariums we are generally lucky if this ratio in inverted and not 99.99% surface bound. One of the reasons for this is lack of free carbon, the other is that if you have one strain that is water borne and gets skimmed out and another that binds itself to a surface, give it long enough and which one will you end up with.
So alot of these products are suggested to be run with carbon sources to encourage water borne bacteria as firstly a way of managing nutrients more effectively and secondly come closer to the water parameters in nature (it is believed that lack of water born bacteria is a cause of old tank syndrome and why a lot of corals cannot be kept in our tanks)
Now we also have two types of water borne bacterai, hydrophobic and hydrophilic those that are attracted to water and those that are not, ie the ones that jump on to our skimmer bubbles and those that are repelled from them. We generally want the ones that will jump onto the bubbles for nutrient export but again they dont get to survive too long in our tank because of this.
The other reason is stability, you know how it takes around 12 months for your tank to stop cycling FULLY because although nutrients are being dealt with to a certain degree you have bacteria reproducing every 30 seconds so you have the equivalent of something like 100,000 years of evolution in humans terms each hour in our tank. So it takes a while for a dominate species to surpass and in between you have waxing and waning and what you end up with may or may not be suitable to what YOU want, which is why you can have two identical tanks set ups, one works great with no issues and the other is nothing but problems and algae blooms.
By adding bacteria source you are stopping the photo copy of a photo copy and maintaining a constant, useful and dominate strain almost immediately. Downside is you need to keep adding to maintain that stability. So you either do it and stick with it or you dont do it at all.
In nature 98% of the bacteria is water borne and around 2% on surfaces. In our aquariums we are generally lucky if this ratio in inverted and not 99.99% surface bound. One of the reasons for this is lack of free carbon, the other is that if you have one strain that is water borne and gets skimmed out and another that binds itself to a surface, give it long enough and which one will you end up with.
So alot of these products are suggested to be run with carbon sources to encourage water borne bacteria as firstly a way of managing nutrients more effectively and secondly come closer to the water parameters in nature (it is believed that lack of water born bacteria is a cause of old tank syndrome and why a lot of corals cannot be kept in our tanks)
Now we also have two types of water borne bacterai, hydrophobic and hydrophilic those that are attracted to water and those that are not, ie the ones that jump on to our skimmer bubbles and those that are repelled from them. We generally want the ones that will jump onto the bubbles for nutrient export but again they dont get to survive too long in our tank because of this.
The other reason is stability, you know how it takes around 12 months for your tank to stop cycling FULLY because although nutrients are being dealt with to a certain degree you have bacteria reproducing every 30 seconds so you have the equivalent of something like 100,000 years of evolution in humans terms each hour in our tank. So it takes a while for a dominate species to surpass and in between you have waxing and waning and what you end up with may or may not be suitable to what YOU want, which is why you can have two identical tanks set ups, one works great with no issues and the other is nothing but problems and algae blooms.
By adding bacteria source you are stopping the photo copy of a photo copy and maintaining a constant, useful and dominate strain almost immediately. Downside is you need to keep adding to maintain that stability. So you either do it and stick with it or you dont do it at all.
