I started in this hobby about a month ago and having read through numerous forums, I could not help but notice this trend of resistance towards 'bacteria in a bottle' despite evidence by many users to the contrary.
I am a first year mathematical biology student and one of the first things you begin to realize is that life is profoundly adaptive; able to adapt and survive in extremely hostile (depths of the oceans/lava) to rich and fertile environments.
The popular argument against products like safestart is 'it's not plausible that bacteria could survive', usually with the added caveat 'I'm not a scientist' is both rather dubious and entirely ignorant. When everything I see in the world around me points me to the opposite. That life can certainly survive in a bottle, obviously not indefinitely, but certainly long enough for you to seed your aquarium. It seems you all are flying in the face of important advances in the aquarium trade in the name of some sort of sanctimonious affinity for fish less cycling. It boggled my mind.
This is akin to refusing to believe the world is round, that debit cards actually work, or there could be flowing water on mars. If we can evolve bacteria to metabolize a different substance, or map the human genome, is it really far fetched scientists would have the capacity to have bacteria survive in a bottle for a finite amount of time? Really?
To each his own is certainly right, but I'll leave you with this: fish less cycling has been proven to work, and certain bacteria products have also been proven to work. If you want to speedup the process and have fish in your aquarium from day 1 (technically day 2), it certainly won't hurt anybody (not even fish, assuming we value their lives, which is entirely boggling to me as well) to give a product like safestart a try.
Regards,