How Long Will Bacteria Survive?

[notscaredtodance]

I'm starting up a 29 gallon tank and I understand transferring bacteria from an established tank can speed up the cycling process. How long does it take for bacteria to start dying off? Will temperature affect it? Oxygen? Or is ammonia the only thing they need?

Basically what happened was, I got my tank and test kit, was ready to add ammonia which I was SURE didn't have surfectant- but it did. So I had to wait from last night, about 9 pm, until today, 4pm to get the ammonia and set up. I work at a fish store (actually just a pet store, but I work in the fish department), and just took the gravel from some of our cichlid tanks- which tend to have higher ammonia, put them in a fish bag with tank water and air, and have had that gravel since last night. Have those bacteria died off already?

I can always just get a used carbon filter from a friend who conveniently has the same size/brand filter as me, if it comes to that, but I'm just wondering.

 

[waterdrop]

You will be much better off getting a mature media donation from your friend and putting it in your filter. The bacterial colonies in the filter are much, much more significant in cycling a tank than the bacteria on surfaces outside the tank. Of course, if the gravel you were referring to came from a filter and were going in to your filter, it would qualify as being good too, as gravel can be a good filter media.

Drying out is the worst thing for our beneficial bacteria. They are pretty much dead if they dry out although a thick media can take longer to do that than one thinks. Not only ammonia but also oxygen are important for maintaining the bacteria within an operating filter. If the water stops flowing through the filter, you will start losing small percentages of bacteria about about 5 hours and this will get worse. With experience, we learn that we can simply manually exchange water around this 5-hour mark if we experience a long power outage, with the drained water going back in to the tank.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[Gvilleguy]

Hmmm...that's good to know. I have not had to deal with a power outage yet - but if I do - you say just circulate some 'fresh' tank water into the filter to help oxygenate the bacteria every 5 hours?

 

[waterdrop]

Hmmm...that's good to know. I have not had to deal with a power outage yet - but if I do - you say just circulate some 'fresh' tank water into the filter to help oxygenate the bacteria every 5 hours?

Yes GVille, with your Fluval external cannister it will be quite easy to handle. What you do is get a fish bucket and figure out how to run the -output- hose of your cannister into the bucket at a lower level than the cannister filter, while still having the -input- hose in the tank. So what you want to do is use siphoning gravity to pull fresh tank water in to the filter, replacing the stale water that is currently in it and allowing that stale water to drain into the bucket, after which you pour that stale water back in to the tank so that if you have to go a long, long time you won't lose too much water level in the tank.

I like to do it more often, like every hour or two, but what I've found from actual experience is that I can go to sleep and get at least 5 hours of sleep before having to wake up to perform another manual refresh of the filter water. It may be that even longer than 5 hours would work out ok but that is what I did and my bacteria survived without me even getting a mini-spike in my overall tank operation despite a several-day power failure. There seems to be just enough oxygen and ammonia up in the still tank to refresh the bacteria. This method was reinforced by tales from other experienced aquarists here on the site, so this particular advice is not just coming from me only.

~~waterdrop~~