A Quick Question About 'emergency Tanks.'

[kmur]

In a situation where you need to immediately set up a temporary tank with no time for cycling (such as if you don't have a hospital tank and suddenly need one, or for much more shallow reasons, if a really good sale comes up on the fish you want to get but your tank won't be ready for a month ,) would large daily water changes (30%-50%) with treated water be enough to compensate for the lack of bacteria to process ammonia? If so, would this be extremely stressful to a new fish? Is there a length of time where this becomes unacceptable?

(I am not in this situation, no worries; It's just a question I thought of that I couldn't find an answer to, and I want to have as many of my question answered BEFORE I get fish. My LFS doesn't even have sales I just had the brief thought while laying in bed this morning, 'what would I do if I found an extremely rare fish that I wanted, but had nowhere to put it and just couldn't bear to pass it up?)

 

[Tolak]

Tank cloning is a good trick;

Huh, I thought the cloning process was completely different from total fishless cycling from scratch.

It is. A few basic things need to be understood to have success cloning a tank. A mature colony of nitrifying bacteria is capable of doubling every 24 hours. Your current colony of nitrifying bacteria in your mature filter media is capable of providing the biological filtration for the stocking you currently have. We don't live in a perfect world, these things are generalizations within certain parameters.

For an easy example, let's say you have a 20 gallon tank with 20 guppys and a suitable cycled and mature filter, running smoothly. Half of that mature media will support 10 guppys. You could take half the media, 10 guppys, and set up a second tank with half the mature media from the first, and be reasonably assured of an instant cycle.

Not living in a perfect world, capable of doubling every 24 hours doesn't mean it will. There are a few basic guidelines I follow when cloning tanks, something I do on a regular basis. First, don't take more than 1/3 of the mature media from a tank for cloning. Second, fast the donor tank for 24 hours before removing media, feed lightly for the next week, less food means less waste produced. Third, follow the same fasting & feeding with the newly cloned tank. Fourth, keep an eye on the water, be ready to do large water changes, this means test, watch behavior, or just change water to add a margin of safety.

Getting back to our example tank, if we take 1/3 of the mature media, which we know will provide the bio filtration for 1/3 of that stock, 6-7 guppys, and add it to a new tank with 10 new guppys we can be reasonably assured of success, following the basic guidelines. Getting to reality, few people stock a tank such as that, and set up a tank such as that, so some guesstimating needs to be used.

Larger fish generally produce more waste, smaller generally less. You would need very little mature media from a large tank fully stocked with African cichlids to clone a new tank with 10 guppys. Taking 1/3 of the media from our example tank would in no way be adequate for cloning a new tank to house a breeding pair of jack dempseys, or similar large fish.

Also understand that cycled media is not mature media. Mature media holds a longer term colony of nitrifying bacteria, at least a few if not several months old.

 

[hillmar77]

I just throw in some extra bio rings in a net inside my penguin 350B. Whenever I need it, I just pull it out and throw it into my quaratine filter media slot.
I've got it set up now where I have a 2 gallon tank empty and whenever i need it, I just pull it out, fill it with water, hook up the little heater, plug in the 5 gallon filter and throw the quaratine fish in.