Can Dead Plants Help Newly Cycled Tank?

FishForums.net Pet of the Month
🐶 POTM Poll is Open! 🦎 Click here to Vote! 🐰

Graft

New Member
Joined
Jun 17, 2005
Messages
20
Reaction score
0
Location
Fresyes, CA
I made a mistake about 3 weeks ago after purchasing a bunch of plants online and introducing them into my cycled aquarium. I thought the water felt warm when I placed them in the tank, but didn't think too much of it since I haven't had my tank up and running for about 10 months. After 24 hours, I noticed that my plants were leaning to the side instead of standing up. After I checked my temperature, I found that the water was around 90F. Since then I corrected the problem and now have some plants growing happily.

Since these plants were gonners, I decided to leave them in under the impression that they would produce a good amount of ammonia which would speed up my initial fish stocking levels to more than 3-4 fish every week or so. My nitrate levels did climb over the 2.5 weeks I had the dead plants in the fishless tank. The night before I added any fish, I swept all the dead plants out and did a 25% water change which brought down nitrates to within 5ppm. As of now, there are no traces of ammonia or nitrites and I have added 11 fish this week (5 otos and 6 silver tip tetras) which are all active and seemingly happy. I'm hoping that the fishes' amount of waste will equal the same amount of waste produced by the dead plants.

I have read the fishless cycling post about adding pure ammonia to the water and thought that this would follow the same route. Has anyone accidently done this before? Am I going to run into problems?
 
the bacteria should remove any ammonia so you will be fine :good:
 

Most reactions

trending

Staff online

Members online

Back
Top