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Originally posted by Randy Holmes-Farley
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Hi Randy,
That's the part that I don't know: if algae can take advantage of ethanol in the water column.
Algae aren't probably taking advantage of anything here, but bacteria are. In low concentrations, this ethanol will be absorbed by anaerobic bacteria and enter the fermentation pathways.
Other alcohols will be processed the same way, methanol for example. For that matter, you can do the same with small amounts of formalin, it gets converted to methanol and utilized.
There were a slug of papers about this in the early to mid 1970's, but I didn't treat them as any more than odd biochemistry trivia at the time. This is such an odd - contrary to intuition result - that I think it even made it into
Science. I always thought that folks adding formalin to their cultures and seeing if they processed the stuff was rather bizarre. Personally, I think the original reseach was triggered by somebody inadvertantly tipping over a beaker of formalin into a tank and noticing that really nothing seemed to mind overly much.
If this treatment lowers phosphate in a tank, it simply means in those tanks phosphate is not likely limiting, but sugars are short supply. Pretty anorexic tanks, probably.