Pleco For Cycling

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furryrabbit

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so im getting a new tank on friday. im going away on the 8th for 4 weeks :hyper: . when i set up the tank im going to use a quarter of the water and some gravel from my existing tank. taking this into account plus the fact that it will have roughly ten days to cycle anyway , will my common plec < ronan > be able to help it cycle while im away if i put him in the daay before i go ( someones coming to feed them twice a day , and im planning to keep him in this tank )
 
did this with my common and he was fine. when you clone a tank as your going to do there is no need to cycle it. run the new filter in your existing tank for a few days put it in your new tank with the water up to temprature, add the some gravel from your existing tank then add the plec within an hour and there you go! carry on as normal but don't add any other fish for a few weeks i think i waited about 3 weeks before i added anything.
 
How large is the plec and how many gallons is the tank? Normally i'd say no, but it may be ok if the tank has enough gallons- one thing is for sure though, the tank will not cycle in 10days on old gravel and water, the bulk of the beneficial bacteria is in the filter sponge.
If you want to cycle the tank quickly you should run the new filter alongside your old one in your existing tank for a week and then move it to the new tank with some fish, or take one of the sponges from the old filter and swap it with on of the new ones if your filters have multiple sponges etc.
 
hes about 5" . its a rekord 80 . do the rekord 80 and 60 share the same size filter sponges ? if so , i guess i could change one of the sponges. and dont worry , itll be a month at least until i even have the option to get new fish - and it could be a while before my lfs get the fish i want in there anyway.

ed- they are both internal filters , so no swapping around
 
No plecs are really sensitive to water quality, as much as they're seen as hardy, they don't do well with ammonia etc. also a 5" plec is already too big for a Rekord 80 tank, sorry. :blush:
 
sorry , hes only 4" ( still too big i know ) . im also not sure if he is a common , but anyways i havent found anyone i trust who will take him -_- < and i wuv him too much to give him to the scummy lps who said they would take him , they asked me what a plecostomus was! >. he has bulgier eyes than other commons? anyway i wont cycle with him then
 
Angel fish are quite hardy. but you will need to want these fish.

if you just want to cycle then buy some guppies and then give them away after your happy withthe tank.
 
Angelfish aren't hardy at all in my experience (quite the opposite) and wouldn't be the best choice for cycling. I'm not sure what *would* be the best choice for cycling as we did a fishless cycle, sorry not to be much help.
 
unfortunatly i went into fish keeping blind and believed the local shop when they said a gibbiceps fry would be okay to cycle my 11uk gal community tank (with a load of platies and ballon mollies and 2 acfs!) :(

i'm trying to find a home for him and my common plec at the moment (for reasons beyond my control) but i think he may be a little stunted because of it :( i measured him today and he is 19cm (7 1/2 inches) and someone said he should be more like 10" plus!

he's never been ill tho that i can tell and has moved house with me 3 times (plus the time he was taken to the pet shop and then came home with me first!) so i think he's quite hardy :)


http://www.fishforums.net/index.php?showtopic=147462
 
I would like to clear up a misconception regarding cycling and bacterial colonies that many fishkeepers have.

The bacterial colonies in any tank always size- either up or down- in response to the available food supply. This is essentially ammonia. The bacterial colonies will always be most dense where the confluence of food and oxygen is greatest. This is normally in the filter. However, they colonize all hard surfaces of the tank. Where they basically are not is free floating in the water. Adding water from a cycled tank to a new tank does virtually nothing to aid the cycling process.

This means that when there is an increase in ammonia in a tank, the size of the bacterial colonies will grow accordingly. Conversely, if you decrease the the available ammonia, they colonies will shrink in size. Put simply- add a fish and the colony will grow, remove a fish and the colony will shrink.

So what happens when you remove media and/or gravel, decor etc from a fully cycled tank to help start up a new tank? If you put a new filter onto a tank, this does absolutely nothing to increase the size of the bio colonies, what it does is spread out the existing bacteia. Since the filter is normally the optimal place for the bacteria to live, there will be a spreading out of the bacteria, not and increase in the total colony size.

When you move that newly colonized filter to a new tank two things occur. First you introduce a colony to the new tank but you also reduce the colony size in the exisiting tank. Move too much and the old tank can spike. The same applies when you move gravel or decor from an fully cycled tank to a new, uncycled, tank.

One key to understanding what is going on with cycling is to realize:
In comparison to other types of bacteria, nitrifying bacteria grow slowly. Under optimal conditions, it takes fully 15 hours for a colony to double in size!
Since few tanks present "optimal" condition, you can figure it will take longer.

The opposite side of this coin is when you remove food source for the bacteria, by decreasing the fish load, the bacterial colonies will downsize to get back into balance with the reduced food supply. So if you remove fish from a tank for a day or two and then return the exact same fish, the tank will no longer have an adequate colony size to support this load and there will be a spike of some amount.

As for using a pleco to cycle a tank, I would never do it. If you need to have fish in your new tank while you are away, I would urge you to buy some hardy cycling fish like z danios or barbs and use them rather than a prized pleco. Even if the pleco survives the process, the odds are good it will never be as healthy as it was before the process and it may even die.

One more note, live plants eat ammonia. So it you plant a tank you basically reduce the available ammonia supply by what the plants take up. What this means for cycling is that you need a smaller bacterial colony to have the tank effectively become fully cycled. For example, if the plant load is able to consume 50% of the ammonia being produced in a tank, then the size of the bacterial colonies need will also be halved. This also means that the overall cycling process will be faster since the resultant amount of bacteria needed to process wastes is smaller and thus takes less time to grow to the needed size.
 
unfortunatly i went into fish keeping blind and believed the local shop when they said a gibbiceps fry would be okay to cycle my 11uk gal community tank (with a load of platies and ballon mollies and 2 acfs!) :(

i'm trying to find a home for him and my common plec at the moment (for reasons beyond my control) but i think he may be a little stunted because of it :( i measured him today and he is 19cm (7 1/2 inches) and someone said he should be more like 10" plus!

he's never been ill tho that i can tell and has moved house with me 3 times (plus the time he was taken to the pet shop and then came home with me first!) so i think he's quite hardy :)


http://www.fishforums.net/index.php?showtopic=147462
When I was starting out I went through something similar. Didn't know much about the hobby and nothing about cycling. So a bunch of different types of fish went through it. I actually still have a bunch of the fish but my jack Dempsey was stunted and so was a common pleco. They're both very healthy now but I can imagine that was a pretty tough time for them.

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