At Reefstock Denver, I met many industry figures in person for the first time. Some of my best connections were those with Dr. Eli Meyer and Dr. Andrew Bouwma. Dr. Meyer owns Aquabiomics, and Dr. Bouwma is his colleague and has run over 70 Aquabiomics tests on his systems. He is heavily invested in gathering data for the company’s pursuits and has proven pivotal in helping showcase potential trends over time in regard to the reef tank microbiome.
I got the chance to sit down and speak with both extensively about our thoughts on the microbiome, the future of the industry, and, most importantly, what we can do to help it if we all put our heads together. Our answer – community science. Instead of waiting years for enough data to come in organically via Eli’s service, why not create a program where users could test specific methods, and then we could monitor the effect on the microbiome in a controlled and organized fashion? This would accelerate the discovery of potential effects existing or new techniques may have on our systems microbial world.
We are still determining all the controls we would like to implement to ensure the data we get is as clean as possible. But we have begun taking in applicants. Our goal with the first experiment is to determine what effect distinct carbon sources have on the microbiome of our tanks. Is there a carbon source that can selectively upregulate the “good” bacterial families? Is there one that leads to an increase in population of pathogenic families? Data pointing in either direction would be beneficial to the hobby and would be able to be determined in as little time as two months, assuming there are conserved trends (which we hypothesize there should be).
After carbon dosing, we hope to explore many more common questions, such as the effect of amino acids, common bottled bacteria, the addition of cryptic zones, UV sterilization, etc. We hope that through continued community approaches, we can create actionable strategies that can lead to the effective development of microbial best practices in the future. If you would like to learn more about the controls we have discussed and the structure of this experiment, be sure to watch the following episode of Reef Recap linked below, where I will go in-depth about the methodology we have discussed.
If you are interested in signing up, fill out the google form below.
Note: If you currently use UV sterilization, you are unfortunately disqualified from applying for this project.
Sign up form
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Vuy_sW8KVPQsDBnysqZQn6BUr0Bjcphh-Y0qC_3C8o8/edit?usp=drive_web
Main image credit DOI: 10.1007/s11430-017-9229-x
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