The white bacterial bloom was in a sense one of nature's possible efforts to cope with the extra ammonia in the water. I suppose in a way, the greenwater was a way of coping with the bacteria, in that the protists (or Daphnia in different systems maybe) ate most of the bacteria.

By causing the greenwater to coagulate and drop out of the water, a lot of nutrients were removed from the water column. By siphoning the green goo out, you kept a lot of the nutrients from getting back into that water column. The nitrogen cycle, by now well developed, scarfed up the extra tidbits.

Skimmed a magazine article yesterday. The bit about aquariums not only being places for living creatures but also being living systems themselves, jumped out at me. That sort of reference is becoming more common. The whole tank can be seen as a sort of ecology or ecological system. And whatever purchased filter we have in there is just a part of the larger biofilter which equals the entire aquarium.