My Doomed Tetra Tank...

[tanksalot]

Hi!...complete beginner fishkeeper here.

I am currently in the first stages of a fish-in cycle because...guess what?...my LFS never mentioned fishless cycling and I had no idea it even existed until my fish were already in my tank

So here's where I'm at.

Tank = 27 litre Aqua 40 with 11 Watt blue/white light (as supplied in the hood), Aqua Flow 1 filter and 55 Watt heater set to 26C.

I bought it last Sunday along with about an inch depth of gravel for the bottom, a quartz rock, a lump of bogwood and three live plants (Cabomba caroliniana and 2 others which I now don't think can live permanently submerged - thanks to my local garden centre for selling me those for an aquarium ) I filled it up and let it run for 3 days - on LFS advice - then went back on Wednesday to get 5 Neon tetras (no mention that they need a mature tank even though I specified that this is a NEW tank...don't think I'll be going back there again ). All seemed well until...


...Thursday morning, when I noticed one of the females had lost her red colour. It was then that I hit the internet and discovered a heck of a lot that I wished I'd known a day earlier! I instantly dashed out and bought some API testing kits and a bottle of Stress Coat, came home and found to my horror that the water was at .25ppm ammonia and about 5ppm nitrite. I did an immediate 75% water change that brought the ammonia down to 0 and the nitrite to .5. I guess I should have done another water change then but I wasn't clued up enough and didn't do another change until Friday morning (one third of the tank) which brought the nitrite down to .25 (ammonia still 0). I did another third of a tank water change later that day which finally brought both ammonia and nitrite readings down to 0. In the meantime the female had mysteriously regained her red colour - maybe it was stress from the move as much as water quality?? I've no idea.

Anyway, on Saturday morning I gave them a couple of flakes of food - I hadn't fed them on Friday - and they were very eager for it. I tested the water and it was still at 0 for both ammonia and nitrite but I thought I'd better change the water anyway as I was going to be out until late that night, so I changed a third of it again. 12 hours later I tested again and got a zero reading for both.

This morning returned 0 readings again but I thought I'd better change some water anyway - I am now ever so slightly paranoid, can you tell?! - and changed about 8 litres. Tested ammonia and nitrite this evening and both are still 0. (I haven't tested nitrate yet as I'm assuming that these big water changes will be taking care of that?)

So that's the story so far. Any advice on how to proceed would be much appreciated! Should I keep doing these big water changes every day whether or not they seem needed, or will that stress the fish unnecessarily?

 

[Mo1959]

Hi. Now that you have it under control what seems to be generally advised for fish in cycling is 10% daily water changes. This seems to be the norm to keep things safe for your fish whilst still allowing the tank to cycle.

 

[waterdrop]

Mo is suggesting a percentage and frequency of water changing to keep your tank safe for your fish while you work yourself through the month or so that the fish-in cycle will take. It might indeed work out to a 10% daily rate, this type of percentage and frequency sounds like a common result for probably a fair range of tanks.

The real test though is to use your API kits to measure your ammonia and nitrite(NO2) levels about twice a day (morning and evening is common) and use those results to gradually work your way in on a good solution for your particular tank. The goal is to always keep the concentration of either toxin (ammonia or nitrite) at or below 0.25ppm thoughout the fish-in cycle. A gravel-clean-water-change should take the levels down very close to zero and then they will build up throughout the period until your next test. You want your percentage water change to have been large enough that the concentration will stay at or below 0.25ppm until you can be home again for your next test and potential water change. No two tanks of fish are the same because the fish themselves will give off differing amounts of waste, the feeding patterns will differ, the water chemistry and characteristics will differ and so forth. Of course either larger percentages or greater frequency of changing can be used to accomplish the goal.

Often the next worry of a new fish-in cycler is whether there will be enough ammonia to feed the bacteria so that they will grow and so that the biofilter will develop. It turns out that that is not a significant worry. There is enough flow of ammonia from the fish to the filter even when our test kits are reporting "zero ppm ammonia" that the bacteria will develop and properly populate the filter media. The A-Bacs will turn the ammonia into nitrite and the N-Bacs will turn the nitrite into nitrate and your water changes will be removing the nitrate. The problem for the first month will just be that the colonies of the two bacterial species will be too small to do this job without you helping out with water changes.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[tanksalot]

Thank you both for replying

So, if I'm understanding this, I have to kind of play it by ear to see what my tank can cope with? Fair enough. I'll try stepping down the amount of water I'm changing a little day by day and keep up with the testing to see where I'm at. Good to know that the tank will eventually cycle no matter how much water I change

Wish me luck....

 

[waterdrop]

The test is whether you can go two days of testing (4 tests) which show both ammonia and nitrite to be zero ppm without you changing any water. For most tanks that are fish-in cycling from scratch (ie. no mature media) this will occur sometime after a month, however there are obviously conditions that can be more difficult and make it take longer.

Most people allow themselves to get excited if they pass the 2-day test but then they still watch their test results for a full week, kind of like a fishless cycling qualifying week. Then they finally have the option of beginning to ease down on the rate of testing and of thinking about whether they want to make small stocking additions, staying within the guidelines for doing that.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[OldMan47]

Welcome to the forum Tanksalot.
You do indeed need to play things by ear. What you will be faced with is a particular reading from your testing. You look at that value and the "acceptable" value of the particular chemical and figure out what percentage water change it will take to get things back under control. A reading of 1 ppm of ammonia with a target of only 0.25 ppm would mean a water change to remove 75% of the chemical or a 75% water change. It is hard to say what your tests will show or what water changes it will take to bring things under control since we do not know exactly how you are going about caring for your fish in terms of food etc. If there is any food left after your fish are done eating, it will increase the amount of water change needed for proper control. I tend to go a bit overboard when I have chemistry problems and do a 90% water change on the affected tank. It saves me needing to spend a lot of time calculating things and always works well to revive my suffering fish. You can instead use a simple calculation to reduce that water change volume by quite a bit but I never worry about that aspect. With 25 tanks running, I really don't have the time required to worry about a single tank, I do the water change and move on. It lets me get my fish chores done quickly and come back here to help people who have real problems, not my easy ones.

 

[tanksalot]

Thanks for the further info, waterdrop and OldMan47 - I'm feeling a little more confident about what I'm doing now

I tested the water this morning and both ammonia and nitrite were at zero. I changed 6 litres of water this time (2 litres less than yesterday) and when I tested the water this evening both readings were still at zero. I'll be interested to see what readings I get tomorrow morning, a full 24 hours after the most recent water change - I'll decide how much water to change on the basis of that.

I am wondering whether I'm actually feeding them enough. My LFS said to feed sparingly so I've been giving them 3 medium sized flakes of TetraMin between the 5 of them every second day. They clear it all pretty quickly so is this a bit mean?? I don't want to overload them - or the filter! - but I don't want to starve them either!

I have a question about behaviour as well. I thought that Neons were supposed to be a peaceful schooling fish but they seem to have spent most of today going their separate ways and having little quarrels when they meet! Are they territorial, or establishing a hierarchy perhaps?

 

[OldMan47]

I find that feeding advice is often on the side of underfeeding. The reality of researched feeding indicates a need for feeding each day an amount that would take the fish 20 minutes to consume. Nobody is going to recommend that much food because the chance of overfeeding would simply be too great. Instead you will find recommendations of feeding from 1 to 2 minutes daily of food. that amount will be enough to keep most fish alive and even growing slightly. As a way to judge your fish's food needs, try feeding them a bit more each day and see if there is any food left over. If not, you have not overfed your fish. That amount of food can be fed daily. Sooner or later, your experiments with feeding will result in food left behind after a period of over 15 minutes. At that point you must back up to the previous experimental feeding level.

 

[tanksalot]

Ah, okay. I think I'll step up the feeding a wee bit and see what happens.

Tested this morning and got 0 for ammonia and nitrites then did a 6 litre water change, as yesterday. Tested again tonight and still 0. If I get 0 again tomorrow morning I'll reduce the water change amount to 4 litres. I'm probably being overly cautious but that was a big scare I had last Thursday and I don't want to get anywhere near that again!

I had a look over in the plant section and identified my two "non-aquatic" plants as a Hemigraphis colorata and a Fittonia. Seems the Hemigraphis will take a while before it starts truly objecting to a submerged existence, but the Fittonia is likely to head to the Great Compost Heap in the Sky in as little as a week's time So that will have to go asap - don't want decaying plant matter making life even more difficult! The Cabomba, on the other hand, is doing famously - I think it's on a mission to take over the whole tank, then quite possibly my living room It may turn out to be way too thuggish for my little tank but it can stay for the moment as my Neons are having a ball chasing through it I've ordered replacement plants for the other two - a dinky little Cryptocoryne and a Java Fern, both of which are apparently difficult to kill, so they should suit me fine!

 

[tanksalot]

A week and a day since my fish went into the tank and I haven't managed to kill any of them yet (touch wood!).

Ammonia and nitrite have been at 0 ever since last Friday thanks to the daily water changes, I guess. I meant to remove a bit less water this morning but it was my first time using the gravel siphon - I normally just bail out the water with a jug - and I was so busy trying not to suck up any fish/plants that I didn't notice quite how much was going until the tank was half empty Oh well...least it won't have done any harm.

New plants arrived today and I found I'd made another newbie error. The Java fern, which I thought was a moderate-sized plant growing to about 30cm, turned out to be WAY bigger than that - many of the leaves were over 40cm - and therefore no use for my tank The Cryptocoryne was bigger than expected as well but thankfully not too big for the tank. I've also added a clump of Java moss for the foreground and it all looks very nice for now - just waiting for my first algae outbreak to go and mess it up

I haven't been feeding my plants up till now because I reckoned they'd be getting nutrients from the fish, but I guess at some point I'm going to have to? Am I trying to do too much at once here, or were live plants a good way to go?

 

[waterdrop]

Its actually the other way 'round.. A new tank will be more sterile for plants and an old tank will have a lot of fish debris to serve as fertilizer. If you are in the UK you could pick up a bottle of EasyCarbo and a bottle of TPN+ (if you're in the US you could pick up a bottle of Seachem Flourish Excel and a set of macro/micro ferts from Seachem or you could investigate making your own from powders.) You would use the liquid carbon as recommended but the ferts in smaller amounts than recommended and you'd want water changes weekly even though you are fishless cycling.

I wish the plants coming in to me were bigger rather than smaller

~~waterdrop~~

 

[tanksalot]

Did my water testing this evening adding a nitrate test as well. Ammonia and nitrite were at 0 but nitrate was at 5ppm. Out of interest I went and tested my tap water for nitrates and it was exactly the same at 5ppm.

So is anything happening in my tank? Or am I removing that much water that nothing can show in my tests? I changed only 4 litres today so I wouldn't have been surprised if something had shown up. Perhaps I'm just imagining that I have fish and plants in there Oh, and shouldn't the plants be influencing the nitrate count - I thought they used it?

I'm feeding the fish every day now, about 3 flakes per time, which they dispose of very quickly. What concerns me though is that they seem to get very bloated tummies from it and start swimming at a 45 degree angle, head down, for about an hour afterwards. They go back to normal thereafter, but is this something to worry about? Can fish have gas problems??? Could the flake food be to blame? (It's TetraMin, by the way)

 

[waterdrop]

Its hit or miss whether you will actually see plants use nitrate from your tank. There are lots of variables. Its a -good- thing that you are not seeing any ammonia or nitrite, your water changing is doing its job. This means its a -doable- fish-in situation. Remember, its a slow process. You can very slowly ease up on the amount/percentage and watch for any ammonia or nitrite beginning to appear. Don't worry whether anything is happening in your tank, it is.. Fish-In cycles are notorious for not giving satisifying feedback!

~~waterdrop~~

 

[tanksalot]

Okie dokie...I will trust that everything is chugging along, then.

The tank continues to be stable. I changed 4 litres of water per day (less than 20%) on Saturday and Sunday and still registered 0 ammonia and nitrite 24 hours later, so I'll reduce to 3 litres for the next couple of days and see what that does.

I googled the bloating problem and found a suggestion to soak the flake food before giving it to the fish so that they don't have to gulp air from the surface while they're eating, and that seems to have helped a bit - less bloating now, and no swimming at a funny angle

I'm thinking of feeding them some live food but those plastic tube-shaped packets of daphnia and brine shrimp I've seen at the LFS look waaay too big for five juvenile neons to have in one go, so can they be kept for a while? If I poured them into a plastic tub and stuck them in the fridge, would they last for a few days?

 

[waterdrop]

When you feed flake food are you just dropping it on the surface? I always to two things with flake food: first I optionally grind it slightly between my thumb and forefinger to adjust the average flake size to the mouth size of the fish I'm feeding (I know, its a very rough estimate ) and then I plunge these fingers beneath the water surface and rub off the food underwater so that it will all already be saturated with water before they eat it. This accomplishes a couple of things - they get less air and it gives the surface grabbers less advantage over the fish that don't like to attack the surface. Of course one downside is that your fingers get messy, so I always have a terrycloth "fish towel" or two that are in the room with the tanks.

~~waterdrop~~