Quote:
Originally Posted by reefwars
sure...but thats not what i did lol 
the other is bacteria ...ill say this it would take chemicals to kill bacteria...simply drying the rock isnt enough to get rid of bacteria , may bring the population down but wont kill it completely as well..bacteria is not in short supply be it in a reef, in the air or anywhere for that matter  |
I think we should be careful with statements like this. As Eli point out, not all bacteria are created equal. The kinds of bacteria I think you'e talking about, the nitrifiers that you need to process ammonia and nitrite, are not nearly as resilient as the heterotrophs that do the majority of the decomposing in a tank. Most heterotrophs can go in to a cyst stage when conditions or resources are not optimal, and as a result can be pretty resistant to things like drying, or storage for long periods in bottles of bacterial supplements, but the "true" nitrifiers, the nitrobacter and nitrosoma bacteria do not have that ability. They also reproduce VERY slowly, dividing once every 10-30 hours, vs once every 20 minutes for most of the carbon eating heterotrophs.
If something happens to disrupt a population of nitrifiers, be that a drying event or a sudden swing in temperature or chemistry (thought their tolerance for temp swings is likely greater than anything you'd pay to put in a tank), it can torpedo their numbers enough to cause a spike in ammonia.
Add to that there are different clades of chemo-autotrophs adapted to different concentrations of nitrogenous compounds. If ammonia gets high enough, you can start killing off large numbers of the kind that are adapted to the nearly undetectable levels of a reef. You'll never wipe them out completely, but these issues all contribute to the instability typically referred to as 'new tank syndrome'.
Anyway my point is that no, you'll never kill them all, but when we're talking about the kinds of bacteria that we care about to keep our fish alive, they are more delicate, and slower to rebound than "normal" bacteria. They get all their energy from the bonds between nitrogen and hydrogen or nitrogen and oxygen, and all their carbon from atmospheric CO2. Compared to bacteria that are metabolically "burning" complex carbohydrates with atmospheric oxygen, this is a costly way to meet your energy needs. Hence the lengthy division time, and why it takes so long to cycle a tank.