Fishless Cycling V Cycling With Fish

[huckFIN]

I'm soon to be setting up a 28 gallon tank and I'll be opting for the fishless cycling method. I understand that the adding of ammonia to start the cycle is in order to take the place of the ammonia that would be produced by the fish if I wasn't going fishless. I also understand that for the size of tank used I will have to add X amount of ammonia to start the process??
If I wasn't going fishless the fish would produce the ammonia themselves but how can it be measured or estimated how much ammonia the fish would produce? (If they were there) and if it can't be estimated then how is it known how much ammonia to add when going fishless.

I probably haven't 'worded' this question as good as I should have done but hopefully someone out there will understand what I mean.

 

[millie1]

hiya- im cycling (apparantly) with fish....

not good

ive already lost 2... the others are now doing great thanks to the info given off the guys on here!!

 

[waterdrop]

Yup, I understand the question. The answer is that there is a very rough guideline for how many fish can be safely stocked in a tank. Without going into all the exceptions, its just roughly 1 inch of fish body per each US Gallon (eg. 28 inches of fish for you.) OK, so what someone knew (I don't know how) was that for any given tank stocked roughly by that rule, 5ppm of ammonia would definately be a slight overstocking amount for that tank (ie. an overstocked tank's fish would produce 5ppm of ammonia.)

gotta run, more later? ~~waterdrop~~

 

[huckFIN]

Many thanks for the help and info people. Definately will be opting for fishless cycling.

 

[OldMan47]

If you want to understand fishless cycling, start by reading this information http/www.fishforums.net/content/New-to-t...shless-Cycling/ It will give you a good start. As WD said, the typical thought is that 5 ppm of ammonia is comparable to a heavy stocking. The whole point to fishless cycling is to get enough ammonia load into the tank that when it gets cycled you can stock your tank fully on the first day. That only takes into account the ammonia and not any other factors that affect fish such as some being very sensitive to good water, not just a cycled tank. When you look at all the factors it is still best to stock lightly and gradually increase numbers but at least you shouldn't need to worry about ammonia.

 

[petertr]

1 thing that always make me wonder is, where does the bacteria come from in the first place?


It just seems to magically appear!

 

[waterdrop]

1 thing that always make me wonder is, where does the bacteria come from in the first place?


It just seems to magically appear!

(let's see, given that each fingertip he is typing with contains about 100,000 bacteria cells, if we multiply...)

 

[waterdrop]

Many thanks for following up on the discussion when I couldn't get back to it oldman.

Just to continue the topic some more... As a "re-beginner" over the last many months that I've been taking a fascinated interest in fishless cycling, I'd say, from the beginner's point of view, the 5ppm ammonia thing is interesting in that it both is and isn't very precise. Once you fishless cycle your tank, you realize in hindsight that usually you were making it ready for many more fish than you actually end up starting out with (since most people end up choosing to -not- fully stock an aquarium right away) but that's ok because its always ideal to have the bacterial populations big enough and then dropping back to the size needed for your real population. That way the bacteria can keep the daily ammonia at zero right from the start. The other way around (like fish-in cycling) and you have excess ammonia in there and are hoping more bacteria will grow to eat it, but there is a definite multiday lag at best in that growth. So the method, while seeming imprecise in description, is actually carefully tuned to be the best choice.

And in another way, it is even more precise than the beginner usually knows: The choice of 5ppm is also made because its been found that if you overshoot and get your fishless cycling ammonia levels up around 8ppm, then you will encourage a *different* species, the wrong species, of bacteria to grow and your whole overall process will be greatly slowed down (because eventually this wrong species will not survive in our type of environment and will have to die off and be replaced by the species that we do want, so much time will be lost.) The bottom line, as a practical matter, is that the fishless cycler wants the introduced ammonia level to be closer to the 4ppm mark than to the 8ppm mark when matching the test colors.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[petertr]

1 thing that always make me wonder is, where does the bacteria come from in the first place?


It just seems to magically appear!

(let's see, given that each fingertip he is typing with contains about 100,000 bacteria cells, if we multiply...)

Quite fortunate that a dry packaged sponge picks up the exact right type of bacteria from chlorine infused tap water though, isn't it!

 

[Miss Wiggle]

well to answer the OP, as they have said above the 5ppm is a rough estimation of how much ammonia a full tank of fish will produce, you could comfortably cycle a tank using 2/3ppm of ammonia and just stock it with half of a tank of fish perfectly sucessfully, but we get people to do it to 5ppm as this gives a ncie cushion, plenty of margin for error and room to stock with a reasonable load of fish from the off. i seem to remember bignose throwin around some calcs on this on the 'when is a cycle finished' topic in the scientific section although i could be wrong......

regarding where the bacteria come from, this leads round to another interesting debat eabout dechlor. its widely accepted that the bacteria we want come from the tap water, but it is also widley accepted that plain tap water that's not been dechlorinated kills off the bacteria..... well i'm sure you can see where this is going can't you. Surley water from the tap can't contain the bacteria if chlorine kills them off or alternatively they come from the tap but chlorine doesn't kill them. This is one of the many reasons why although I do use dechlor (it's cheap and easy and i like to stay on the safe side) i'm certainly not gonna get into chrisis mode if i run out of forget for one water change.

 

[waterdrop]

1 thing that always make me wonder is, where does the bacteria come from in the first place?


It just seems to magically appear!

(let's see, given that each fingertip he is typing with contains about 100,000 bacteria cells, if we multiply...)

Quite fortunate that a dry packaged sponge picks up the exact right type of bacteria from chlorine infused tap water though, isn't it!

, seriously though, have you read Tim Hovanec's work? The way we describe cycling here in the hobby is fairly over-simplified. I'd guess the reality in the filter is a real tussle of many different bacterial species. Because its fresh water and because we control the temperature and the pH and the food sources, its a pretty well-known thing that our particular two species will win the tussle in the end. When its salt water, different species win. When the pH is too high, different species win. When the temp is way off, different species win.

But yeah, even though it works out and its a known thing, I still find myself in awe that these two particular species multiply up out of seemingly nothing to become dominant and reliable. I proved it to myself by doing my fishless cycle with a brand new tank and equipment and no plants, no mature media or other introductions, just conditioned tap water and ammonia. It took time but in the end, there they were!

~~waterdrop~~

 

[waterdrop]

well to answer the OP, as they have said above the 5ppm is a rough estimation of how much ammonia a full tank of fish will produce, you could comfortably cycle a tank using 2/3ppm of ammonia and just stock it with half of a tank of fish perfectly sucessfully, but we get people to do it to 5ppm as this gives a ncie cushion, plenty of margin for error and room to stock with a reasonable load of fish from the off. i seem to remember bignose throwin around some calcs on this on the 'when is a cycle finished' topic in the scientific section although i could be wrong......

<...>

Yeah, to continue with this part of the topic: MW, I was thinking how I believe you and I and a bunch of members have discussed before that the chosen point of ending fishless cycling and making the big water change and adding fish is really just a chosen point in a long continuum of possibilities. If one were to only dose to 3ppm and then stock with a half-load, that is one point. The gold-standard endpoint of when the filter can drop all the ammonia and nitrite from a 5ppm ammonia dose within less than 12 hours is another point. And six months later, when even the most pessimistic fishkeeper is finally ready to add neons or ottos, or whatever other fish he feels is "delicate" is another popular point along the timeline of tank maturity.

The thing for beginners to realize is that its all a sliding scale and there are few guarantees of absolute success. The "gold-standard" (as I'll just call the rdd1952 5ppm/12hour guideline) seems to have proven to be the most solid and popular point to go with (no doubt many expert members here could still debate about it quite a lot!) and anything less, like the point when your filter still takes 24 hours to do the zero drops, or can only do 3ppm, are all falling back to a riskier situation. Or of course, there's fish-in cycling, where all heck breaks loose.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[rhostog]

It would be interesting to know - though not sure if anyone can answer this! - what is the actual difference between a 'mature' and a newly cycled system? It's not just numbers of bacteria, because a newly cycled system can be consistently processing a full load of ammonia, with zero detectable ammonia and nitrite. But experienced fish keepers consistently say that they wouldn't add certain fish to a newly cycled system, whatever the readings. What makes an established system somehow more stable or balanced than a new one?

Is it something about the mixture of bacteria - as waterdrop points out, there are dominant species in different conditions, but they won't be the only ones present, there must be other species working away, perhaps in symbiosis with the ones we recognise - or perhaps to do with how the bacteria are physically attached to the media - or something else entirely?

Good luck to huckFIN with your fishless cycle - I hope you'll keep us posted on your progress!

 

[OldMan47]

What makes a newly cycled tank not as inviting to fish as a mature one is the same thing that makes a mature forest a richer environment than a tree farm. It is the vast diversity of life in the tank that makes all the difference in the world. A freshly cycled tank is a simple system that can do one thing well. It can process nitrogen without killing the fish. A mature system has all the other microorganisms that gradually reach a balance and work better together than the simple system we start with. There are parts we know about like the organisms called infusoria that your new born egg layer fry need to thrive and there is little you can do to get them established except get a biological presence with wastes present so they have a source of nourishment. I am equally certain that there are many things present that nobody has actually analyzed. Like any other ecosystem, a mature tank is very complex and we can only see the "trees".

 

[Tolak]

It would be interesting to know - though not sure if anyone can answer this! - what is the actual difference between a 'mature' and a newly cycled system? It's not just numbers of bacteria, because a newly cycled system can be consistently processing a full load of ammonia, with zero detectable ammonia and nitrite. But experienced fish keepers consistently say that they wouldn't add certain fish to a newly cycled system, whatever the readings. What makes an established system somehow more stable or balanced than a new one?

Is it something about the mixture of bacteria - as waterdrop points out, there are dominant species in different conditions, but they won't be the only ones present, there must be other species working away, perhaps in symbiosis with the ones we recognise - or perhaps to do with how the bacteria are physically attached to the media - or something else entirely?

Good luck to huckFIN with your fishless cycle - I hope you'll keep us posted on your progress!

Biological exclusion; http/www.fishforums.net/content/New-to-t...opic-107912hl-/