First question here, what is cycling your tank? Why do we do it?

Reaching a level of stability to create a food chain that maintains such.

 

Good, but Im counting on a little more thorough explanation for all levels of marine exp. Dumb it down and ramp it up if you will..

 

To me cycling a tank is getting it prepared to support ocean life.

Does everyone need to be a marine biologist and need to know the science behind cycling a tank and everything that goes on in the tank to have a successful salt water tank? I don't think so. I think just understanding a high level of what to look for can make many people successful in this hobby.

As far as how to cycle a tank, I am fan of using pure ammonia. Some people have argued that using raw shrimp or fish food is better because it adds things to the tank that ammonia won't. The problem is it was all assumptions and nothing that could actually be tested for. Nor was there any proof that using raw shrimp was any more successful then using pure ammonia.

If you use pure ammonia and add a fish in when the cycle is done, then your tank is now getting fed and has real fish poo in it. As long as your first introduced fish survives then what proof is there that using ammonia is not as effecient as using raw shrimp or fish food.

My vote is pure ammonia. You know exactly where your tank stands and you can dose to any level at any given moment.

Now if someone can prove that using a raw shrimp in fact offers something more to a cycle that is needed then using pure ammonia I am listening but if fish A survives in tank A which was cycled with pure ammonia and fish B survives in tank B that was cycled with raw shrimp they are both successful and within no time tank A now has all the rotting food that tank B would of had and the fish still survives. So what is the difference how you get to your endpoint if the result is the same.

Edit: my post shouldn't be mistaken that a detailed discussion of a cycle is a bad thing just that people should not be intimated or think they need to understand all the technically talk that might go on this thread. Also, let's be clear on what people assume to happen and what we can prove actually happens.

 

Your post was not bad, but I want to start with the basics. What does ammonia do? Why do we need it to kick a cycle? Do we need it if we are using cured LR, and or Live sand?

 

Do we need it if we are using cured LR, and or Live sand?

Sure we do, if not to kick off the cycle but at least to measure the level of the biological filtration of your live rock or sand. It is a quick and simple way to know if your tank can handle live stock or not.

 

I also have another question. How do we know how much ammonia our tank needs to be able to process in order to successfully support your first fish. What levels of ammonia does that first fish cause in the tank.

Maybe a tank can support an ammonia level of only .50 but what if a single fish only needs a biological filter that can support an ammonia level of .25.

Also, using a raw shrimp how do we know what level of ammonia we are cycling to? Does one piece of shrimp have the same effect in a 300 gallon tank like it would in a 30 gallon tank? Do you need more shrimp in the 300 gallon tank?

 

Also, using a raw shrimp how do we know what level of ammonia we are cycling to? Does one piece of shrimp have the same effect in a 300 gallon tank like it would in a 30 gallon tank? Do you need more shrimp in the 300 gallon tank?

Good ?, I would like to know also.

 

Oh yay! Just like the old weekly/bi-weekly discussions! im so excited now!

Cycling a tank is a process where you grow bacteria to handle the bioload of fish, other critters and coral. there are a few groups bacteria, the heterotrophic and autotrophic, that work together to complete a cycle of ammonia to nitrite to nitrate then to nitrogen gas. the heterotrophic bacteria, under special nutrient loads, can also convert ammonia straight to nitrogen gas.

fixed link again - https://www.scribd.com/doc/182676082/Understanding-Heterotrophic-Systems
this is also known as vodka, vinegar, sugar or carbon dosing.

Ammonia is a byproduct of the heterotrophic bacteria breaking down organics and is toxic to fish and other critters. it is also a food source to bacteria. the ammonia is a needed food source for autotrophic bacteria, it is then converted to nirtrites.

To my knowledge ammonia is needed if we are dealing with cured live rock to provide food for the autotrophic bacteria, however, it is not needed to be added directly to the tank, in the form of straight ammonia or as organics. there will be plenty of organics already in the live rock to provide a sufficient amount of ammonia for the bacteria to sustain themselves for months until those organics have depleted.

the same could be said for sand I think, but I don't and haven't done much research on sand and how bacteria works within it.

 

Can you get away with adding live stock, (hypothetically) in a week?

i can.
When i up graded my 20 gallon to my 65
I acclimatised my fish for an hour, and put them
right in because i did not have enough time.
I thought they were all gonna die but no, the
heater adjusted in less than 2 hours and the
filters and whatnot started right away without trouble.
Nothing died until the 4 month mark but thats another story.
so i totally believe you can do this and just depends how.

(i did not use any water from my other tank either.)

 

if you used the same rock and same fish, you never changed the bioload

 

Cycle - the cycle of ammonia being created, then eaten, and converted to less harmful organics that we remove manually/mechanically. The cycle of waste being produced and then handled by the ecosystem.

 

Yay, some discussion. But hold up, let's not get to dosing anything yet. Here's a question, if we add x ammonia, are we adding to sustain or create? What and when is to much ammonia, is there a limited amount of ammonia to consider?

 

Create would be my thought. Too much is any that can't be promptly dealt with when you have life in the tank other than the bacteria. Limited amount to consider....I'm lost. Enough to keep food chain alive and healthy would be my only guess.

 

It seems that x ammonia will create similar x bio filter. However, you can go too high with ammonia and stall a cycle. So initially we are adding to create and then sustain after that. I would personally say anything over 3 ppm is too much. If you add too little in the beginning, you get this tiny little cycle that can't sustain itself. People often miss the spike, then the nitrites, and the subsequent nitrates. Too much and they sit there and look at an ammonia level for weeks at a time that isn't going anywhere.

I tried the pure ammonia method once and had a cycle stall in the nitrite phase. A bottle of snake oil fixed it right up and that tank is fine now. I feel the raw shrimp and ghost feeding is the best way to go. If you feed like there is a fish in there (you gotta know how much to feed first off), you are creating just the right amount of ammonia to sustain.

 

I cycled my tank with around 4ppm of ammonia. No problems there. Also, when you say stalled in the nitrite phase, how long are we talking here. It can sit there for a while and then bam, one day it's just gone. Also, a simple water change would have brought that number down if you wanted it to cycle a lower number of nitrites in a quicker amount of time.

And like you said, how much food do you feed a tank that would be considered the correct amount? What is the peak ammonia level when feeding the tank reaching? If you knew that and that number was your goal then you can easily hit that number on the dot with using pure ammonia.

So the question is, how much ammonia does your biological filter need to handle in order to have a successful cycle?

After my cycle, my tank was able to process 2ppm of ammonia within 24 hours. Does it really need to be able to process that much to add a fish? Would it processing 1ppm or even .5ppm be enough to support your first fish and your journey to stocking your tank?

 

if your adding ammonia, be it straight ammonia or organics, your adding to create until the cycle is strong enough to add a fish, you add the fish to sustain the cycle.

I don't think you can have too much ammonia. the cycle will take a lot longer, but all that ammonia to my knowledge goes to bacteria growth. I think the hobbies 2ppm converted within 24hours is a good standard to follow when starting a tank or checking a cycle.

I cannot for the life of me find any research to back all this ammonia stuff up, but ill keep searching until we get this one.

 

amount of ammonia to consider-

I think the amount to consider should be low. just a steady stream of ammonia that's gradually getting more concentrated as the bacteria grow. such as a small piece of shrimp.

you add the shrimp. the heterotrophic bacteria begin to work on the shrimp and each day a little more ammonia is created
at first there is a low amount of ammonia, but there is also a low population of autotrophic bacteria to process the ammonia. as the days go there is more and more ammonia produced and the autotrophic are more able to keep up with the amount of ammonia being produced. well its not that they are 'keeping up' its just that the ammonia wasn't added all at once, rather its a gradual upswing. this same process would apply to nitrite as well. going this way its possible you might never see a ammonia or nitrite spike and only see nitrates in the end.

 

amount of ammonia to consider-

I think the amount to consider should be low. just a steady stream of ammonia that's gradually getting more concentrated as the bacteria grow. such as a small piece of shrimp.

you add the shrimp. the heterotrophic bacteria begin to work on the shrimp and each day a little more ammonia is created
at first there is a low amount of ammonia, but there is also a low population of autotrophic bacteria to process the ammonia. as the days go there is more and more ammonia produced and the autotrophic are more able to keep up with the amount of ammonia being produced. well its not that they are 'keeping up' its just that the ammonia wasn't added all at once, rather its a gradual upswing. this same process would apply to nitrite as well. going this way its possible you might never see a ammonia or nitrite spike and only see nitrates in the end.

I always appreciate your thinking and some times it's way above my head but if in 3-4 weeks I am able to add a fish to my tank what is the difference if I used raw shrimp, pure ammonia or pee'd in my tank? If the levels were constantly low and you never saw it or you saw spikes at every level. The end point is exactly the same.

Like I mentioned before, people have argued that by using pure ammonia you aren't getting all the required bacteria needed as you would by using raw shrimp or fish food. I say prove it or show me the magic bacteria that comes from the raw shrimp that is needed. If it's there it's obviously not that important to the first introduction of a fish, otherwise people who cycled with ammonia would constantly be killing their first introduced fish and that is not the case.

Also, within the first day of introducing that fish you now have fish poo and are feeding your tank so if there is magic bacteria that is formed from this stuff, you now have it also. There, even playing field and unless you see spikes in ammonia and nitrite, the important things to look for in your tank when first introducing your fish that is important for it's survival are taken care of.

 

Gonna stay tuned for this one. I will say tho, isn't carbon involved in this somehow? All things in life require carbon. In our tanks the food we feed our fish gives up carbon. The fish use up some. Everything uses it. Could this be what the limit for the bacterial load our tanks can sustain?
This is of course my theory and I could be very wrong on this

 

this applies highly to the heterotrophic bacteria. this is how carbon dosing gets nice results with low nitrates.

https://www.scribd.com/doc/182676082/Understanding-Heterotrophic-Systems - fixed link

scroll down to heterotrophic bacteria

 

for a further explanation, the heterotrophic bacteria can multiply a lot faster then the autotrophic bacteria. when you carbon dose the heteros take advantage of that and with the extra nutrients (carbon, because you were right luckyfather, carbon is limiting) they build upon their population. they will effectively starve out the autotrophic bacteria because autotrophic bacteria take longer to multiply. heterotrophic are able to convert ammonia to nitrogen gas

 

Great threat TotS!!!

G~

 

My points on cycling are not commonly held thats for sure:

Cycle is optional
have never cycled any reef Ive put online or on youtube and thats a lot of reefs. Boring to cycle so I skip it by using purple live rock and arrive alive wet pack sand, put in LPS and sps frags the same day I brought home the rocks or for some tanks a few days later on payday. Just like what tanked show does only I'm not using sixty tangs.
Current system going on ten yrs from that date.

If someone wants to cycle new rock then cleaning ammonia and dr Tim's can get it ready for fish in as little as two weeks and you certainly won't be getting pistol shrimp hitchikers in that kind of setup. Its Eco friendly to make your own live rock.

We can't mention cycling and not mention API ammonia test kits. They are almost universally used by new tank keepers to make biological inferences about their tank.

API ammonia kits are useful for indicating fish loss or larger amounts, and some get a zero reading to know when a cycle is completed in terms of ammonia digest within 24 hrs ability.

But the majority...what do search returns show? I validate search returns...for example, anyone who has never kept a nano reef can learn to keep one just off search returns for key words. What the masses do regarding aquariums using current info isn't all that bad, and we can see neat patterns off what people post to see where the masses might be wrong as well.

search out threads for things claimed so far and post back alternate views. Makes good discussion

If I linked all the API threads with .25 it would be pages so I'll save that initial linkage. This is debatable to many, I'm seen as API hater but moreso I'm tying API into stark challenges new keepers tend to have with cycling. All forums have the threads. We get them here about weekly or bi weekly, consistent .25 question threads, either all those tanks had .25 for months or....

Recent case in point
http://www.thereeftank.com/forums/f6/ammonia-levels-still-about-to-give-up-227757.html

Algae is seen as part of cycling, and that mode of though drives our problem algae threads. Algae love when you leave them in a tank, or scrub them around in full dispersal mode.

Cycling is for bacteria, however we were told for 20 yrs that algae come and go during a cycle. About 50% of the wrecked tanks in the large algae threads got that way by letting algae do its natural thing, the other half had no concerns due to their unique variables.

You can guarantee early success in a reef or fw planted tank by simply disallowing algae independent of age of tank or nutrient levels. Strive for great nutrient control, however that has no bearing on whether or not we have a tank purely free or wrecked of algae.

I'm a quick fix non cycler who uses biology to get what I want, thats the option as it see it

Knowing the nature of bacteria gives you independence from retail purchases

Interestingly, nitrifiers are everywhere. They come out of your untreated tap water fully alive right in the middle of zero ammonia water and some chloramine. How is that, if they are totally dependent on humans supplying API verified ammonia to them? Huh. Maybe thats not required, maybe they find it anyway. Search on !
we drink them in glasses of water or boil them in our spaghetti. We are constantly inoculating things with them, even the lacrimal fluid in our eyes as we give a quick rub. Just as humans weren't able to stop inoculation of live nitrifiers, same goes for ammonia. There are bare bones, no retail purchase ways of cycling even dry materials and this is helpful to know so that you command and predict any type of cycle.

I see cycling as the most interesting and easiest thing to control aspect of aquarium biology whether starting with dry or seeded material. Its so predictable that no ammonia testing is needed for the life of any reef tank as long as you design the rock structure so that no fish can be unaccounted for, and tune the initial bioload to the known capabilities of the rock and substrate in the tank.

 

As pointed out above by Brandon, Using LR, LS, and other tricks you learn over years he has successfully "skipped" for lack of a better term (no offence intended).

So why do you constantly hear, young and old, "you cant add anything for at least 4 weeks"?

Two opposing methods?
When does an appropriate cycle need to take place?
Do you or can you suffice with cured LR, LS, and fresh SW and add livestock within a week?

Also seems to have been skipped, but what is the point of Ammonia to begin with?
Remember this should be "start, middle, end" this way newbs and youth can really grasp what is happening.

 

As pointed out above by Brandon, Using LR, LS, and other tricks you learn over years he has successfully "skipped" for lack of a better term (no offence intended).

So why do you constantly hear, young and old, "you cant add anything for at least 4 weeks"?

Two opposing methods?
When does an appropriate cycle need to take place?
Do you or can you suffice with cured LR, LS, and fresh SW and add livestock within a week?

Also seems to have been skipped, but what is the point of Ammonia to begin with?
Remember this should be "start, middle, end" this way newbs and youth can really grasp what is happening.

If your live rock is really that good, then adding pure ammonia to your tank, whether you dose to .5ppm, 1ppm or 2ppm within 24 hours your ammonia and nitrite reading should be at zero. In that case I agree, why wait 3-4 weeks. You bio filter is established enough to handle a load.

Now if you did this and you still had ammonia in the tank a day or 2 later, then no I would not add any livestock to the the tank as the rock is not as good as you might think.

Sure you can add shrimp to the tank to test the rock but why wait for something to rot, plus you never know when exactly ammonia started to build. You might check 2 days later and see zero ammonia and nitrite but that can either be because the break down process of the shrimp hasn't started yet or you rock took care of it. It is a guessing.

Adding ammonia you are not guessing anything. It is instant, dose and it is there. No guessing about it.

 

Geoff, thanks and hopefully you can add to this discussion.

 

Ammonia is formed when the excretion of fish in the tank, or any other waste material within the tank starts decaying and decomposing. Decayed food matter and any other decaying organic materials can increase the concentration of Ammonia within a tank. When the nitrogen compounds in the decaying matter is released into the water, the decomposing bacteria will first turn this into Ammonia

 

Most folks weren't around for the biweekly discussion threads Geoff use to do. This is one of them that I am happy to ask the questions and watch the debate, it creates a vast amount of data, articles and opinions in one easy to follow and read place.

Lets keep going from the beginning, and go off of the next step in the cycle, which is?

 

lol what was the last question. I know ive alone talked about; organics -> ammonia so we must be on nitrite production

 

First, thanks to all, as this is interesting stuff and I need to learn more.

IMO "the cycle" being of the most relevence to this post is the one that converts ammonia to nitrite and then to nitrate via nitrifying bacteria. If it is a cycle then it is forever ongoing or a process often repeating. Ammonia and nitrites must be present in our tanks to a small degree all the time right? It is verification that these bacteria are present and established in sizeable numbers to keep the cycle cyling that we are looking for. We throw in shrimp or ammonia , catch ammonia ,nitrite spikes with our test kits and/ or wait 4 weeks. This is for the verification of something we can't see going on that we basically take for granted after that. Why do we do this ? To make sure it is safer home for our inhabitants.

Is this a correct understanding ?

 

pretty much, and id like to emphasize the 'If it is a cycle then it is forever ongoing or a process often repeating. Ammonia and nitrites must be present in our tanks to a small degree all the time right?' part.

but that isn't the end of the cycle, nor the beginning. ammonia comes from organics being broken down in the beginning and at the end of the cycle de-nitrifying bacteria convert nitrates to nitrogen gas

 

I've started up three reef tanks in two years 14g, 14g and 50 gal respectfully . I had verification on the first 2 14g via testing (14days and 7days).The 50gal I never had verification with a test kit and I think I know why? All three tanks I waited 4weeks for fish. What is the harm in being extra sure? Better safe than sorry. That is why it is a popular answer as PhaneSoul i think previusly mentioned.

 

I've started up three reef tanks in two years 14g, 14g and 50 gal respectfully . I had verification on the first 2 14g via testing (14days and 7days).The 50gal I never had verification with a test kit and I think I know why? All three tanks I waited 4weeks for fish. What is the harm in being extra sure? Better safe than sorry. That is why it is a popular answer.

Wise discernment, I feel this way as well. And nothing wrong with with taking your time to be sure.

I feel some good point have been made as far as a time frame goes. That being said, I do feel many people are quick, perhaps to quick to throw out 4 week minimum. Infact to many times on TRT, as well as other forums you see people not elaborate on there set up. Causing more members to throw out this "rule of thumb", but this goes both ways. To much assumption in the hobby I think.

 

Its an ok time period as a guess. We just like to nerd out details so people started to want more specific time frames for their setup.

we wanted to make sure to impart that no guessing is ever needed for cycling and depending on what the pictures show for the live rock (is there coralline) it is as ready to support a bioload on day one of the tank as it is on day three thousand.

If the rock was partially cycled, or in some cases fully cycled but has no coralline (for example cured in a dark vat,works fine for nitrifiers they hate light) then specific testing is needed to confirm. When pictures show coralline heavy growth, and we can exclude the use of antibiotics in the live rock history (hardly ever used in reefing so pretty much never) then you can be sure the bacteria is set. You can't get coralline growth and not have a full complement of bacteria.

Where purple live rock can leak is from dying worms. Dying sponges not so common but mainly worms, hermodice etc. bring it home wet and its a guaranteed safe xfer. At least for me it is, people online routinely find ways to kill or second guess live rock I guess heh

Interesting point number five

Coralline is a highly reliable indicator of nitrifying bacteria presence. Inextricably linked provided no antibiotics are used.

 

So nitrite. its a byproduct of the bacteria that consume ammonia. the end result is nitrates. its been shown nitrite isn't as toxic as ammonia in marine conditions, but it is toxic in freshwater fish. one explaination is because of the calcium content in saltwater.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0045653504009993

that's pretty much all ive got on nitrite