End Of My Cycle

[scrapps]

So I'm nearing the end of my fishless cycle. The bacteria is able to go through 5ppm ammonia to nitrites to nitrates in about 12 hours or so for last week. But now I have some questions:

This is my tank:

29 gal
eheim 2215 classic
topfin heater (for up to 30 gals)
bubble wall
Pool filter sand
some amazon sword and water wisteria


There will be 1 dalmation molly, 1 swordtail, 1 cory (I got them before I found this place and I got the 29 gal so they can have friends)


Now what I was planning on doing was moving the three above to the 29 and then using my ten gallon as a quarantine tank and eventually adding new fish to the 29 gal every two weeks or so. The only problem with this is that I would be starving some of my bacteria that I've built up.

So my other thought was to keep the three guys in the ten gal for another 2 weeks or so and put an almost full load of new fish in the 29 gal (as this is what you'd usually be doing if you were buying all new fish, right?) My concern with this is that, even though I will be getting my fish from a very nice LFS (and not PetCo!), that they could still come down with something and if I have to treat it with antibiotics I could kill my precious bacteria.



Also, as my swordtail and molly school together I wasn't planning on getting anymore mollys (I feel bad now knowing that mollys are brackish fish and am loathe to get more if they can't live in brackish conditions.) My plan was to get 4- 5 more swordtails and 5 more corys, but my LFS recently got in some pygmy corys that are just adorable and I would love to be able to 6 of those too but that would put me at overstocked. I wasn't sure if the pygmy corys would school with other corys like larger corys do. My filter is rated at much higher then my tank so I was wondering if I would be able to overstock by like 2-4 inches?

Thanks

 

[waterdrop]

I don't know, maybe somebody else will see a problem with it but I don't see much wrong with your plan to get the new fish for the 29 if that's what you want to do. I think you have to have a positive attitude and not worry about the new fish possibly being diseased, which would be beyond your control. The fact that you are sticking to the pretty stringent rule for the end of fishless cycling should mean you will have an excellent environment for them and if their like ours, they will thrive and love it.

I think the batch of pygmy corys sounds great and I'd think they'd get along with your larger one just fine, although perhaps 5 instead of 6 would keep your stocking numbers down a tiny bit. I would only get one (or 2?) more large corys.

In the long run you can run an extra hob or internal on the main tank which could be moved over to the 10g for use as a Q-tank or H-tank if needed. Or you could just plan to take some media out of your classic for that purpose.

~~waterdrop~~