My First Attempt At Fishless Cycling... Help!

[EmilyC]

Hi all

Two weeks ago I got a lovely new fish tank I set it up with some lovely sand and some plants I brought from the fish shop, added some ammonia and began the journey of fishless cycling. I already have a Biorb so I rinsed out the filter into the tank to give it a bit of a head start. All was fine, and then I went away for 4 days and left my friend in charge of looking after the tank and taking all the readings- which she dutifully did. Trouble is, by the time I got back from my holiday all the plants where more or less dead and we can't work out why.

Initial thoughts where prehaps the light wasn't on, but nope, she said it was on all day and only off at night. I also thought perhaps she had had to add some ammonia to the tank to increase the levels, but nope she says she didn't. In fact the only thing she did with the tank was to take 5ml of water out each time to test it.

Any ideas anyone?



I'll post below the reading I have for the last 10 days, all taken 24hours apart, PH is around 7.6 and the water temp is 25

Ammonia Nitrite
0----------- 0
3----------- 0
3----------- 0
3----------- 0.25
3----------- 0.5
4----------- 0.5
4----------- 1
3----------- 1
0.5--------- 5

 

[Amunet]

Silly question, but are you sure they were aquatic plants?
What kind of plants? Some plants such as crypts will lose their leaves when disturbed enough, but will grow new ones. Are you using any kind of plant substrate or liquid ferts or anything? Could be lack of nutrients.
I'd post in the planted section of the forums. Lots of very knowledgable folks who I'm sure will be able to help you better And if possible take a photo of the plants and post that up as well to help them ID what ya have.

 

[EmilyC]

Silly question, but are you sure they were aquatic plants?
What kind of plants? Some plants such as crypts will lose their leaves when disturbed enough, but will grow new ones. Are you using any kind of plant substrate or liquid ferts or anything? Could be lack of nutrients.
I'd post in the planted section of the forums. Lots of very knowledgable folks who I'm sure will be able to help you better And if possible take a photo of the plants and post that up as well to help them ID what ya have.

Yeah they're aquatic plants!! One of them I took from my biorb where it had been flurishing! I'll try and take a picture in a bit, not sure it will help much though, they're pretty dead!

 

[Alliecat420]

aquatic plants need ammonia to feed.. i would add plant food (flourish is what i use) this will ensure your plats have food until you get fish.. i would also advise you add an airstone if you dont already have one.. give your plants co2

 

[OldMan47]

The ammonia processing bacteria in the tank seem to be developing nicely Emily. The dead plant material is adding ammonia to the tank constantly by decaying and the reading is still going down. The nitrite rise is not at all unexpected. Nitrites will eventually get too high for your test kit to measure before they come down on their own. You can sort of see the drop coming if you watch nitrates because they will start to rise when the nitrite eaters start to expand and grow. Keep an eye on your pH because a serious drop in pH can slow or stop your progress. As others have already mentioned, crypt melt can resemble a dead plant but lots of them will recover from nothing but a bit of live root material. You should remove the dead leaves so that you can control how much ammonia is going into the tank.

 

[waterdrop]

Yes, agree with OM47 and amunet, cycle looks to be coming along ok.

A freshly started tank is a often a hostile place for plants in that its "too clean" and just devoid of many of the 17 chemical elements (B,C,Ca,Cl,Cu,Fe,H,K,Mg,Mn,Mo,N,Ni,O,P,S,Zn) that plants need in order to eat and survive. Some of these elements (Ca, Mg and some trace metals) come in with the tap water in greater or lesser amounts depending on how hard the water is. C (Carbon) is a source of intense focus among plant growers because its needed in large amounts to make glucose and cary energy throughout the plant but us hard to get to submerged plants except with CO2 or new products we call "liquid carbons." H (Hydrogen) and O (Oxygen) are pretty easy, being available from water and air.

Many of the other elements are often supplied via fertilization. Fertilizers are divided into macro-nutrients (N-Nitrogen, P-Phosphorus, K-Potassium) and micro-nutrients (most of the rest of the 17.) Alliecat is right: Seachem Flourish (usa, or perhaps TPN+ (Tropica) in uk) is a good macro/micro liquid fertilizer. Seachem Excel (usa) or Easylife Easycarbo (uk) are "liquid carbon" products that can be used alongside the normal fertilizers. Not much quantity of these liquids would likely be needed in a biorb, so these might not be as expensive as they sound. Light range for this type of approach would need to be probably between .8 and 2 watts per US gallon. Sometimes "root tab" (tablets) fertilizers are additionally helpful in a stark new tank inserted under the roots of larger "root centric" plants like amazon swords or crypts perhaps.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[EmilyC]

Thanks for all the helpful replies

I'll go out Monday and buy some plant food... I like the idea of adding a tablet to help fertilise until the fishies are added.

Quick question, as the plants are pretty much dead is it worth simply throwing them away and starting again with new plants, or will they recover?

 

[OldMan47]

If you are in the US, you can get a product called Plantex CSM+B that gives you basically all of the trace elements in powder form. I mix it with water which makes it easier to dose in my high tech tanks. Low tech plant tanks can get by fine by getting everything they need from the fish food that you put into the tank. It is one of the very basic principles behind the Walstad El Natural tank planting approach. That approach uses real potting soil substrate and fish food for all of the plant nutrients. You put a layer of sand or small gravel over the top of the potting soil to keep it from floating around in the tank. My El Natural experiment is starting to make a believer of me although I also have 3 tanks running with artificial ferts and pressurized CO2 and lots of lightly planted tanks running on low light set ups.

 

[waterdrop]

Yes, you do want to remove excess plant debris as soon as you know a given leaf/stem probably won't make it as it will add randomly to the ammonia load on the tank, giving you less control over your cycle. If its a rooted plant though, don't remove the crown and roots as it may regenerate the leaves later.

In my opinion, understanding the ins and outs of planted tanks and good plant growing is an awful lot to handle as a beginner with a new tank, so don't worry too much if all the complicated stuff OM47 and I get off talking about doesn't make complete sense or doesn't seem to work out quite right yet. Its just good to get started learning about it as an ongoing aspect of the hobby.

Right now, getting a working biofilter via fishless cycling and understanding all about the nitrogen cycle will constitute really good core knowledge for you, ongoing, in the hobby. Also, understanding good gravel cleaning and maintenance will be good also.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[EmilyC]

Thanks all for the advice, I went out this morning and brought some plant fertiliser. The man in my LFS suggested some tablets to go under the plants and then a liquid to add to the water when I do a water change. He also convinced me to buy some very odd looking contraption to introduce CO2 into the tank... I think I may be very suggestable!! I've also cleared out the dead leaves, removed two very very dead plants and brought four new ones.

Here's a picture of my newly re-planted tank! The colours don't seem to come out very well, but it looks very pretty!!

Just waiting a while before testing the water again to see if my messing around in the tank has affected anything!

 

[waterdrop]

Wow, those salesmen are successful! Here you've been hanging out with picky aquarists like us (probably the very tiny percentage of people with tanks that are true hobbyists) and still you can walk into an LFS and fall under the spell of the salespitch, sheesh!

Well, no big deal, it probably takes years of muddling around with different knowledge, plants, fertilizers and other equipment to really get the hang of plants anyway so you might as well get started!

What he has sold you is a device that falls into the category we call "DIY CO2," which is an all-encompassing thing for all types of bottles where you ferment sugar and yeast, either from supplied tablets or from your kitchen shelves and allow the CO2 that produces to bubble into your tank. The CO2 this produces is fine, but the flaw in that overall approach is usually that it gets to be entirely too much fuss over time and most people give up on it. Don't worry about it for now, just hoping my 2cents will add some helpful perspective for the future. The other two approaches to getting the element "C" to the plants are "Pressurized" and "Liquid Carbon."

Pressurized refers to periodically having a high pressure metal tank filled with liquid CO2 and then hooking it up to a rather expensive regulator contraption with pressure dials and then piping the CO2 through various check valves and potentially through bubble counters and ultimately a reactor or other device to increase CO2 concentration in the water (just like the bubble ladder is attempting to do in your DIY setup.) The pressurized route is either a lot of work or expensive or both at the beginning but then is much easier to maintain long term and delivers a much more consistent CO2 level over time usually which is a very desirable thing.

Liquid carbons are bottled products you pour into your tank (somewhat expensive long term) which attempt to deliver carbon to plants in an intermediate chemical form that the plant can take up and use. This approach has no startup cost but continues to be expensive long term. It has bonus qualities and negatives compared to CO2.

Ideally you will need to take the specs of both the liquid and tablet fertilizers the guy has sold you and break them down into the amounts of each of the nutrients they provide and then figure out how that would fit into a fertilization program, like reduced EI or something like that. It could be that they are way off from the ideal levels you would really want or it could be that they're ok. Also its ok to just ignore all this detailed advice, just use the ferts for a bit and just remember to come back to this advice later and figure out possible improvements to your plant approach later.

~~waterdrop~~
ps. your plants sure look great against that sand!

 

[EmilyC]

Wow waterdrop... thanks for all the advice!!!

I think for now I'll just leave the tablets in see how it all goes!!! It all seems a bit too complicated right now! I just want my fishies to have some lovely plants to swin around in, so I will come back and read later- but you're right for right now it's all a bit TMI!!! But I appreciate the help!

Quick question... I'm in Day 15 on my fishless cycle and my NI levels are still around 5 even though my tank can process AM to 0 in 24 hours or less, is this usual? Do you know how much longer my cycle will take? Sorry I know that the million dollar question!!!

 

[waterdrop]

Entirely normal for the ammonia to be dropping to zero while the nitrite is still getting in to the spiking stage. The 2nd phase, during and after the nitrite spike is often longer than the 1st phase preceeding those.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[EmilyC]

ARRRGGGHHHHHH Please help...

I have a 30l biorb, I've had it for over a year now and I've always tested the water using the "dip sticks" and it always looked fine. Since getting my new 65l tank and starting the fishless cycyling and joined this forum I brought the API Master test kit. I'd been testing my new tank religously and thought yesterday I wonder what the water quality of my biorb is, so I tested it... OUCH the AM was 0.5 and the NI was 1... not good, so I did an immediate water change. I waited until this morning, still not great reading so I did another water change- bigger this time, around 40% and took another set of reading the Am is fine, but the Ni is still reading at 0.5

So my question is two fold, how many water changes is it safe to do in one day? Should I just wait until tomorrow and test again and then do another change or should I do another one now? I don't want to upset my fishy but clearly they haven't been living in the pristine conditions I thought they were

Also I'm now concerned about moving them over to the new tank... will it be too clean for them? I know it sounds like a silly question, but if they are used to living in not so good conditions will the move shock them too much?

In my biorb at the moment I have 5 neon tetras, 3 little corys, 2 chain loaches, and 2 fishes that suck on the tank- sorry I don't know what type they are, I also have 3 cherry shrimps.

Thanks for any help

 

[waterdrop]

Its not silly to worry about "move shock." There is a thing called "old tank syndrome" where fish will acclimate to an aquarium that never has its water changed but instead receives "water top-ups." As the water evaporates, all the dissolved substances remain and each time you top up the tank, more dissolved substances are added, particularly the things like Calcium and Magnesium that constitute the water hardness. The cells of the fish must adapt to this in order to keep the mineral levels correct for the inside of each cell and these adaptions can only be made slowly by the fish. If you then come along years later and suddenly change out the hard water for much softer water, the fish will die.

(OK, just explaning old tank syndrome there, not suggesting you have it this bad!) (but... what were your water change habits on the biorb?)

Assuming you've been doing water changes on the biorb every couple of weeks or every week, then you won't have the above worry and will be free to immediately do much more significant water changes to help the fish that are in the biorb.... So now back to answering your first and most urgent question if you are free from the above condition:

The answer is that you can do as many water changes as are needed, but its better to wait at least an hour between changes. The changes themselves should be 50-70% water changes assuming you see a reading above 0.25ppm for either ammonia or nitrite(NO2.) Assuming you don't have OTS (old tank syndrome) and also assuming your tap water doesn't have a lot of ammonia in it, then the issue of diluting ammonia and nitrite(NO2) that is above 0.25ppm *trumps* all other concerns.

In practice what usually happens is that you may need to do several large water changes an hour apart at first to get your levels at or near zero, but then it won't take as many to maintain things below 0.25ppm. Each time you return (from work or sleep) to test your biorb, your goal is that you should not find ammonia or nitrite(NO2) above 0.25ppm. If it is then you need to increase either the percentage or the frequency of the water changes or both. Its up to you to figure out the adjustments.

After all this emergency stuff, I'd perhaps start a new thread seeking out advice from other biorb-experienced folks about what works to change or beef-up the filtration system. I believe its probably the culprit for your water not having been satisfactory - I've seen a lot of comments related to that but I'm not up on it myself.

~~waterdrop~~