My New Tank And Fish... Update!

[HayzH]

Hi fishcakes, yes a reading of nitriteNitrate is EXCELLENT!!!!

It meand that your filter is processing ammonia into nitrite and then nitrite into nitrate

Don't use the ammonia remover, all it does is convert the ammonia into ammoniaAmmonium or just uses a few dormant bacteria to get rid of the ammonia.

Twice a day in small amounts is best, it means they have longer to digest each meal and they don't just chuck out food they haven't had time to digest.

I am assuming the orange molly is a sailfin right? My sailfin was aggressive to begin with, but now he is very gentle and eats out of my hand, literally.

Glad to hear they are more active

My other molly often looks at herself as well!

 

[Fishcakes]

Hi fishcakes, yes a reading of nitrite is EXCELLENT!!!!

It meand that your filter is processing ammonia into nitrite and then nitrite into nitrate

Don't use the ammonia remover, all it does is convert the ammonia into ammonia or just uses a few dormant bacteria to get rid of the ammonia.

Twice a day in small amounts is best, it means they have longer to digest each meal and they don't just chuck out food they haven't had time to digest.

I am assuming the orange molly is a sailfin right? My sailfin was aggressive to begin with, but now he is very gentle and eats out of my hand, literally.

Glad to hear they are more active

My other molly often looks at herself as well!

Thank you Did you mean nitrAte is good? We have 0 ammonia, 0 nitrite and 10 nitrate, but I guess that's good anyway so yay!

I'll keep the ammonia remover though incase of an emergency for when we add new fish later on (will wait at least another 2 weeks don't worry!). Do you mean it converts it to ammoniUM?

I will feed them again tonight then, someone mentioned only feeding them once a day but I wasn't really keen on breaking a routine. I have been feeding them shortly after turning the lights on, and just before the lights turn off. I find now that when I turn the lights on in the morning and open the hatch they all zip close to the top and the orange molly chases the other two away. Clever fishes but I guess she will calm down eventually.

No she's not a sailfin, but she was the biggest and the brightest molly in the tank when we got her so think she's used to running the joint She's pretty fat compared to the other molly. No dark patch though so hopefully not preggers from the tank/immaculate conception...

The other molly has done nothing but look at herself since we got her once the platy stopped hiding and got braver she's got a strange fetish with the mercury thermometer. Swims to the top of it, then around it, then around it again, then around it again... at one point, she did it for 3 hours straight. But I digress. I love watching them.

 

[HayzH]

awwwww..... i miss my 3 mollies

 

[Fishcakes]

Does this mean that my tank has already cycled?

 

[Dieses Madchen]

Does this mean that my tank has already cycled?

No, your tank is fully cycled when it can completely process within 12 hours. Keep monitoring the ammonia levels, and when you are no longer doing multiple water changes throughout the week, you can resume normal weekly water changes and you sholdn't have anything to worry about. Even after it is cycled, be sure to monitor at least weekly. My tanks are well established and I still check my ammonia, nitrites, and nitrates bi-weekly

 

[Fishcakes]

Does this mean that my tank has already cycled?

No, your tank is fully cycled when it can completely process within 12 hours. Keep monitoring the ammonia levels, and when you are no longer doing multiple water changes throughout the week, you can resume normal weekly water changes and you sholdn't have anything to worry about. Even after it is cycled, be sure to monitor at least weekly. My tanks are well established and I still check my ammonia, nitrites, and nitrates bi-weekly

I checked it again this morning, more than 12 hours after I last checked it. Ammonia - 0, Nitrite - 0, Nitrate - 10/20. Yay

Fish are more active and less lethargic than they used to be.

 

[N0body Of The Goat]

Fishcakes, from the information you have given us so far, I for one do not believe your filter is anywhere near being "cycled."

Why? Because unless I've missed it, not once have you had a positive result for nitrite, as a result of some ammonia being eaten by bacteria.

Generally speaking, there is normally a delay once the ammonia eating bacteria are present, before nitrite eating bacteria start to multiply in a new filter.

In conclusion, your fish are still going to need at least 50% water changes every day without fail, until you have replaced the inaccurate test strips with liquid test kits. Doing a "fish in cycle" as you are doing is likely to take an awful lot longer than ~40 days for a "fishless cycle," because you need to keep that water safe for the fish above all else, whereas in a "fishless cycle" you would not have to be concerned about ammonia or nitrite levels.

 

[Dieses Madchen]

Fishcakes, from the information you have given us so far, I for one do not believe your filter is anywhere near being "cycled."

Why? Because unless I've missed it, not once have you had a positive result for nitrite, as a result of some ammonia being eaten by bacteria.

Generally speaking, there is normally a delay once the ammonia eating bacteria are present, before nitrite eating bacteria start to multiply in a new filter.

In conclusion, your fish are still going to need at least 50% water changes every day without fail, until you have replaced the inaccurate test strips with liquid test kits. Doing a "fish in cycle" as you are doing is likely to take an awful lot longer than ~40 days for a "fishless cycle," because you need to keep that water safe for the fish above all else, whereas in a "fishless cycle" you would not have to be concerned about ammonia or nitrite levels.

+1. It took 3+ months for my fish-in cycle to complete.

 

[The Taffy Apple]

Does this mean that my tank has already cycled?

No, your tank is fully cycled when it can completely process within 12 hours. Keep monitoring the ammonia levels, and when you are no longer doing multiple water changes throughout the week, you can resume normal weekly water changes and you sholdn't have anything to worry about. Even after it is cycled, be sure to monitor at least weekly. My tanks are well established and I still check my ammonia, nitrites, and nitrates bi-weekly

I checked it again this morning, more than 12 hours after I last checked it. Ammonia - 0, Nitrite - 0, Nitrate - 10/20. Yay

Fish are more active and less lethargic than they used to be.

It is quite common for tapwater to return a NitrAte reading of 10/20/30ppm.. a cycled tank should, and most probably will, show about 50/60/70 ppm.

 

[CezzaXV]

I agree with Taffy. Your nitrate reading seems far too low for your tank to be cycled.

When you cycle, the bacteria turn the ammonia into nitrite, then the nitrite into nitrate. If your tank was cycled, you should have much higher nitrate as that's the end product. The fact that you have such low nitrate leads me to believe there's little to no processing going on in your tank at all.

 

[Tizer]

A Fish in Cycle on my 240 litre took me 6 weeks. I dont believe a fishless and a fish in cycle are very different in all honesty. The only difference with a fishless cycle is the fact that you can ramp up the temperature to 30+ and speed up the process (a little). Ammonia doesnt have to sit at 4/5ppm for the filter to cycle "correctly", the amount of ammonia that a handful of fish put out will be enough. This thread is becoming a little hard to digest now, but its quite simple to summarise what you need to do. Test the water, with a liquid kit, if you get ammonia or nitrite, do a water change, enough to bring it below 0.25ppm of either reading. Do it daily until your test nolonger shows either. simples, now we can all sleep at night.

 

[KittyKat]

We've invested in some "Ammonia remover", I know it's not as good as water changes themselves but how am I best using it? The bottle seems to indicate its good for emergencies rather than regular water changes.

I do recommend that, if your dechlorinator does not convert ammonia to ammonium (Stress Coat and Prime do, for example), you do use and combine this product with your dechlorinator. There are no downsides to keeping the ammonia as ammonium and the upside is that your fish are not as harmed as they would be by the ammonia. The effect of these products is only temporary, so they can only be used in combination with water changes and I suspect that they only work on low concentrations of ammonia.

There is no reason to let the ammonia be more harmful to fish when it is possible to convert it to ammonium.

We have bought about 10 strands of the pond weed as suggested. Not enough to completely cover the surface of the tank, but we spoke to a different person at the LFS to who we saw when we got our tank and fish and he was very knowledgeable about the nitrogen cycle, he talked us through it and confirmed that the pond weed will help. Also, when we rinsed the pond weed what my boyfriend thought looked like a snail egg or a baby snail was in the bag with it. He only noticed it once we had already put the weed into the tank, but we did rinse the plants well before putting them in the tank anyway, and after noticing it we very carefully checked them again and couldn't spot any more. We don't have a quarenteen tank and we'd be hard pushed to make room for one anyway.

Personally, I do not worry about snails as they are a low bioload and most species will rarely breed out of control unless there is a lot of dead plant matter in the tank and/or one is overfeeding.

Also, we brought some blood worms in jelly to give to the fish. So far we have been feeding them twice a day on a tiny amount of flakes, but if its best we will reduce feeding the fish to once a day. We got the blood worms because we want our fish to have a varied, healthy diet.

Until the tank is fully cycled, it is best if you feed only once every other day. Once the tank is cycled (you see no ammonia or nitrite readings if you do not do water changes), very slowly increase feeding to 1-2 times per day, all the can completely finish in 30 seconds. In the long term, you should still have at least one day per week without food.

Will the dominating behaviour of the orange molly settle down after the cycle? It's especially evident when being fed.

Unlikely: mollies are known to be aggressive and the ones I have kept have always been aggressive.

A Fish in Cycle on my 240 litre took me 6 weeks. I dont believe a fishless and a fish in cycle are very different in all honesty. The only difference with a fishless cycle is the fact that you can ramp up the temperature to 30+ and speed up the process (a little).

I have found this to not be the case for exactly the reasons you point out: fish-less cycles can provide more ideal conditions for bacteria and the ammonia concentrations can be kept higher, which probably speeds up the reproduction rate of bacteria. Keep in mind that a fish-less cycle with 4-5 ppm of ammonia does allow for full or almost full stock, while a fish-in cycle with a 6 or so fish ("handful") in a 240 litre aquarium would not: it would take some more weeks of slow stocking to get a fish-in cycled filter to be able to take the same stock as a fish-lessly cycled filter.

 

[CrazyAirborne]

regarding the fish behavior, I have a platy who has chosen a smaller platy to constantly harass. Its only them two, and I dont think the smaller one is challenging the other, its just like a hatred almost. no matter what the mickey is doing, if little blue comes by, then mickey will chase him away, no matter what. Ive seen them have dominance bouts, and all the fish no their place it seems, but this is different. the mickey always chases the blue, no matter what. and to be honest, the mickey did the same thing to little blue's mother. I think he sees the color similarity and thinks its the original female tbh.

dont know if that made any sense, but basically, ive had the same situation!

 

[Fishcakes]

UPDATE!

Got the liquid tests, the results are -

Ammonia - between 1.0 and 2.0ppm (yes I am doing a water change)

Nitrite - 5.0ppm

Nitrate - 4.0ppm

Also, turn out that my mollies are both male, which could explain why they dislike each other. I want to have male and female mollies. What should I do?

 

[the_lock_man]

UPDATE!

Got the liquid tests, the results are -

Ammonia - between 1.0 and 2.0ppm (yes I am doing a water change)

Nitrite - 5.0ppm

Nitrate - 4.0ppm

Also, turn out that my mollies are both male, which could explain why they dislike each other. I want to have male and female mollies. What should I do?

5ppm nitrite? How are the fish still alive?

Keep testing the water after you have changed water - anything over 0.25ppm is bad - this is TWENTY TIMES that. If you have anything over 0.25ppm, change the water again. And again. And again.