Re: New Canister seeding - Don't raise the Biowheel - lower the Floss

["S. Hieber" <shieber at yahoo_com>]

Neal De Pape, who's been a sport about the kidding, said,
in part, about why he didn't use his old filter media to
spike his new filter:

> I didn't use any bio-balls or lava rock or other
> bacteria substrate in the actual canister, I counted
> on the bio-wheel for all my biological filtration.  So
> there really wasn't anything to transfer to the new
> filter.

I'll go out on a limb here and assume you had some media or
other in the canister and not just the passing water. 
While some media are marketed as especially apt for
bio-filtration due to their high surface area or ability to
easily shed excess bio-film, or some (somewhat oddly) both,
still whatever you had in the old canister would have the
little monadic monsters in abundance, even if you had a
biowheel running.  (In fact some APDers would suggest that
the biowheel, once it had been in use for a while, had very
little surface area and very little bio-action going on. 
But I'm not pressing *that* point.)  All wet surfaces that
are not robbed of oxygen will have bio-film, even if it's
the surface of floss, pleated polyester or paper, sponge, 
plastic balls, or shredded coffee can lids.  You might have
had, say, a sponge for mechanical filtration, but it's hard
to convince the bacteria of that -- very short attention
spans.  You can keep killing them off with visits to the
wash basin, but when you put the media back in the filter,
those unstoppable bio-buddies flourish again.

Any old media could help spike the new filter,
Scott H.

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