What's wrong with providing the new pets under your care, the tropical fish, with the kind of environment they thrive in and not the type of environment that's increasingly driving their species to extinction?
This thread brings together three common fallacies on display for our beginners:
1) That fish-in cycling situations are shorter and easier than fishless cycling.
2) That fish are not harmed by fish-in cycling situations.
3) That bottled bacteria products are an easy solution to cycling.
The main limiting factors in speeding up the creation of a working biofilter are the actual slow rates of biofilm construction and cell division and colony formation of the two autotrophic species needed for the filter to become operational. The source of food, the ammonia, does not change these limits. A fish-in cycle takes just as long as a fishless cycle but is just less controlled because the aquarist has less direct control over the amounts and dose timing of the ammonia. It would be difficult to place controls on how much water fish move through their gills or how much they pee and when.
As far as ease of biofilter preparation (or cycling as we call it,) its a pretty subtle difference between a good fishless cycle and a well-performed fish-in situation. The main headache for fish-in is the greater number of large water changes that must be performed in an attempt to limit the amount of damage to the fish. In a well-performed fish-in, the number of fish and their size will be tiny compared to the tank volume, which will lower the size and number of water changes for the hobbyist but will drag out the process for a longer time. Very few beginner fish-in cycles are well-performed. In most cases the number of fish used is much to large from the get-go. Once a hobbyist has successfully performed a fishless cycle it becomes more obvious to them why the fish-in practices became old-school back in the 1980s.
Secondly, its a myth that fish are not harmed by fish-in cycling situations. This, I believe, has been pretty well-understood by ichthyologists for decades. Even young aquarists often have some early experiences with healthy-looking fish dying that help them to realize that visual inspection by humans bears little to no relation to what fish are experiencing or what the state of their long-term health is. While it is quite true that tolerance (the capacity for enduring) of ammonia and nitrite(NO2) varies greatly by species, there are still some fundamentals that are well-understood.
When water passed through the gills of fish, ammonia is given off, in addition to carbon dioxide. Fish waste, in addition to excess fishfood and plant debris is broken down by heterotrophic bacteria into additional ammonia. In the natural habitats in the Amazon and Africa where our hobbyist fish evolved, this ammonia is constantly washed away and diluted by thousands of gallons of fresh water at essentially zero ppm ammonia levels (unlike what might be found in our polluted industrial waterways where our tropicals wouldn't be found to begin with of course.) Ammonia, even in tiny amounts, and even in species that are tolerant of it, causes gill damage that leads to shortened lives or death in worse cases.
As hobbyists know, our first species of autotrophs, Nitrosomonas spp., convert ammonia into nitrite(NO2.) Nitrite, even in tiny amounts, attaches readily to the hemoglobin protein found on the red blood cells of fish blood, just as if it were oxygen. The nitrite combines with the hemoglobin to break down the red blood cell and destroy it. This process can actually be observed by scientists visually as the red blood cells turn to brown mush. Some species, such as various catfish species can acually survive a fair amount of this mis-treatment but it is certainly not a condition they thrive in or presumably would enjoy. Nitrite poisoning's first effect is nerve damage, with brain damage leading other peripheral damage and showing up in nearly all cases as shortened longevity or death. The fact that looking at fish doesn't show one all these does not mean they aren't happening. They are.
Thirdly, the "bottled" bacteria products: Here I think the jury is out, but in our forum we try to help beginners realize that it can be expensive and frustrating to participate in a random and uncontrolled experiment to see if someday there will be a bottled product that works reliably. Most of our hesitation here is due to the hundreds of cases we see here each year that have no positive results in terms of time saved. In the case of at least one product, one of our members was even successful in persuading one of the staff at the company to admit that the "process" actually consisted of the dead organic matter in the bottle being converted by the heterotrophic bacteria into ammonia.. meaning that the company considered the product to be an indirect ammonia source! One of the best researchers in the field, Tim Hovanec, feels that a bottled product can work, so there's always hope out there, but so far, the actual hobbyist experience with bottled or refridgerated products is almost never different from controlled fishless cycling time frames.
Personally, I find the fact that fishless cycling simply -removes- the possibility of harming the fish significantly and the reduction in water changes to be the two most compelling arguments for fishless cycling. I also happen to find it rather fascinating from a practical application standpoint and quite enjoy it, compared to my years of watching some of my fish die when I was young and the process didn't exist. We all know that the adoption of new knowledge and change can take generations, but at least forums like this one can serve as an aid to that gradual learning.
~~waterdrop~~
To this day i have not done a cycle on either of my two taanks and i have not had one fish dye!!!
to TFF
