Ingo, nice! your right about the ane, heta, and all the other "bugs" that compete with the patho...it's late. I add a handfull of soil and such also, like many i add pill bugs too.
the mention of the probiotic liquid, the bacteria are completly suspended, to see if adding more the the normal limit of the bacteria, like a few thousand per ounce, would combat more of the gecko-fecal parasites or something. just thinking. Deven Message: 3 Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2004 09:41:48 +0200 From: Ingo Kober <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Organization: Phenex Pharmaceuticals AG To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [gecko]::Hetatrphic Bacteria:: Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hi Deven, I guess you are talking about heterotrophic bacteria. This term describes the energy metabolism of bacteria rather than being a taxonomic term. If you want, we can do an excurs in microbiology...but maybe that would be quite off topic. Anyhow, the major topic of your post is competition between harmless and pathogenic germs. Thats a very interesting pont which is largely ignored by those herpers who prefer to keep their herps in semisterile setups. In reality, even the most thoroughly cleaned and sterilized tank is everything but sterile. At its best, its low in organic substrates, bacteria could feed on. But in such an environment, excreted strains of pathologic bacteria can multiply in overseen pieces of feces or food or even minute amounts of contaminated water without major growth competition and thus can built up dangerous concentrations. In an environment which is inoculated by natural soil flora (which include heterotrophs as well as autotrophs, aerobes as well as facultative anaerobes, "true " bacteria and cyanobacteria as well as fungi and protozoens), any overseen feces or food is rapidly degraded by these organisms. So pathogense do just not find enough available substrate to multiply on and moreover are directly outcompeted by other harmless organisms. (growth competition can be described quite nicely by some mathematic models and this has been done extensively by microbiologist, but here its enough to know, that even minute growth advantages and headstarts can lead to almost 100% elimination of the unpriviledged strains) Its not possible to provide a single strain of bacteria to do the job or even a controlled mixture, since most of these germs are ubiquituous and reinfect any environment, which is not kept under absolute sterile conditions. Anyhow, for all these reasons I strongly recommend natural setups with natural non sterile substrates. For all my tanks (except for the very dry desert setups) I inoculate the substrate with a good portion of forest soil, which serves as a starter culture for soil flora and fauna (which besides bacteria , algae and protozoans includes a lot of arthropod species). These critters help to remove any debris very effectively. In my big basilisk tank (770 gallon) for example, I only remove feces from branches and leaves (even there, some Zophobas bettles do help, since they eat feces sticking to branches) and never remove anything from the soil. Five years after the last change, the soil of this tanks smells good (Geosmin) and any visible poop completely vanishes within less than 24 hours. The substrate is full of myriapodes, wood lice, mites, Collembola etc etc and of course streptomycetes and diverse bacteria. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ingo _______________________________________________ Global Gecko Association http://www.gekkota.com Classifieds http://www.gekkota.com/cgi-gekkota/classifieds.cgi gecko mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.gekkota.com/mailman/listinfo/gecko
