I unfortunately didn't find this forum, or hear about the idea of fishless cycling until after I already had fish. But I just got a pair of zebra danios, and I know they are pretty hardy, so hopefully they will survive the cycling! My question is: should I do water changes often in the early stages of cycling to help relieve the fish of toxic chemicals like ammonia nad nitrite? It seems like it would make sense, but I don't see it specifically mentioned here on the forums. Your help is appreciated!

Randee

Yes

Even though you are cycling tank, when using fish they are your primary focus, this will drastically slow down your cycle.

Whatch the level of ammonia and nitrites and water change based on those levels. Do more if your concentrations are higher.

IMO, I'm not sure if water changing will drastically slow down the cycling process though. Most of the bacteria is supposed to live on the surfaces and filter media so I'd imagine chaning water should not decrease the population of bacteria, no?

This post has been edited by yhbae: Sep 23 2004, 03:44 PM

Do as many water changes as needed to keep Ammonia & Nitrite under 1ppm and you should be fine. I don't think water changes slow the cycling process at all, as already mentioned the bacteria are surface based. I cycled my tank in around 3 weeks from a fresh start and there was a time when I water changing daily.

The reason the water changes slwo the cycle is because they remove the food required for the bacteria to multiply. If there's loads of ammonia and nitrite they can multiply quickly cos tehre is unlimited food, but when you do water changes you restrict how fast they reproduce.

I somehow doubt having higher concentration of ammonia will speed up the cycling process. As mentioned above, as long as there's some ammonia present in the tank all the time, bacteria is multiplying at the fastest possible rate (same as saying there's enough ammonia that it will not become the bottleneck).

Personally, I'd keep do more water changes (without thorough gravel vac) until ammonia level becomes low to reduce the stress of the fishes...

There is no set rules for cycling a fish tank. But I have done side by side test on 3 tanks, and doing more than needed water changes did slow down the cycle and doing none did not speed it up. This was fishless cycles so I didn't have to take fish health as reason for PWC's. But fishless or with fish you should keep ammo under .50.