Help With Fish In Mini Cycle?

[ellena]

I have a betta in a 3 gall bowl. The filter media was cycled in another tank.
Ammonia is 0 so the filter must be working, but nitrites are higher-0.5 yesterday and up to 1 today I did 3 changes today to get it down but because the bowl is at work, I can't do anything in the evenings.
Any ideas why this is happening and how long it might last? Taking the media from the other cycling tank made a noticeable difference to its cycle, so there must have been a good bit of bacteria on it. The nitrite eating ones seem to have gone on strike though.

update-it was going OK, NH3 and NO2 very low. But since wed, I've had gradually increasing NH3 with no NO2 at all. I did a water change when it reached .25, but I'm not sure what's going on now?

 

[ellena]

Well, it was better today. I went in at 8 and got ammonia-0 nitrites-0.25. I also added a couple of bits of ceramics from my cycling tank and by 4 it was ammonia-trace nitrite-trace
But, I made the decision to bring him home, just for this weekend. I hope that by next weekend it will have settled down and he can be left

 

[waterdrop]

Hi ellena,

Sounds to me like you are handling it perfectly! You're doing all the right things you can do. Sometimes the young colonies just don't behave quite as we'd expect and you have to be vigilant about watching the stats. Eventually they will settle down.

One good thing, and I don't claim to know this for sure, but, is that I think the betta is a species that will be a small bit more tolerant of that bit of excess nitrite you've experienced. Anyway, we can hope so.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[ellena]

Thanks WD Everyone at work thinks I'm mad Comments like 'when I had a fish, I just chucked it in' and 'that fish will die of over attention'. Not nasty though-it's a science dept. I work in, so they understand the nitrogen cycle and some of them have been quite interested in my 'little vials of coloured stuff'

 

[waterdrop]

Well that's good, sounds like a fun place to work. I've certainly found that the fascination (that obviously shows in my voice) I often express about the whole nitrogen cycle and other TFF sciency topics when I get into conversations with non-aquarists is an interesting people sorter. Its a minority but you never know when you're going to run into someone who kind of "gets it" and who also becomes interested in the topic. Don't you think its a lot more fun having something like a little betta tank when you know you're bringing the full force of all this TFF info into the process as compared to otherwise perhaps having a poor drooping unhappy betta in a bowl if you didn't have a clue about these topics?

~~waterdrop~~

 

[ellena]

Oh definitely! Left to my LFS I'd have a betta and 15 tetras in a 25l bowl. And magically with running the filter for a couple of days and a 25% change every 2 weeks, they'd all still be alive