[APD] Phages

[Stuart Halliday <stuart at mytriops_com>]

I believe Robert T. Ricketts wrote this email section below:

> We have the information, techniques, and technology available to do almost
> whatever we wish with aeration, current, filtration, feeding, water
> management, lighting, planting, etc., through the whole gamut of tank
> management practices.  But hobbyists still do manage to stunt fish,
> suffocate fish in planted tanks (no mean trick there), kill fish in uncycled
> tanks, set incompatible and overstocked Noah's ark tanks, and somehow fail
> to get the message that captive aquatic critters should be bigger, stronger,
> healthier and far, far longer-lived than their wild kin.

Good words.
And we're still learning.

I've been reading with interest the work the Russians do with Phages 
(bacteriophage), viruses that kill bacteria.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage

Seemingly there are millions of these viruses in rivers and other wet areas 
which is believed to keep nasty bacteria levels down. This is seriously 
under-researched work as the Western world went down the route of using 
antibiotics and may prove to be valuable in the future as I'm sure this is 
one area in which we lack.

For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudomonas_phage_%CE%A66
This virus kills the Pseudomonas bacteria. This bacteria causes fin rot in 
fish and red leg in amphibians.

Imagine just buying a capsule of this virus and dropping it into the tank so 
it only kills the bacteria you don't want. It also can't make the bacteria 
resistant like antibiotics.

Seemingly these phages collect in the bio-film of water. So I guess 
collecting bio-film from the local body of water where the fish naturally 
come from may get us these viruses?
As the viruses are smaller than bacteria a suitable fabric with nano-holes 
in it would filter out the bacteria.

-- 
Stuart Halliday
http://mytriops.com/
200 Million years in the making...
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