Raw shrimp cycle, ammonia zero, add another shrimp?

[Oioiayay]

Hi guys,

Used a raw shrimp as an ammonia source to kick off my cycle, fishless but planted, sand substrate.

Had 3-4ppm ammonia for 2 weeks, zero nitrates/nitrites. Then yesterday had my first reading of nitrates & nitrites, slight reduction in ammonia down to 1-2ppm.

Today, nitrates & nitrites present again, ammonia has gone to zero.

At this point, do I need to remove the decaying shrimp, do I add another shrimp to keep the bacteria fed/ammonia up?

Not planning on adding any fish yet.

Cheers

 

[TwoTankAmin]

I cannot help you here besides saying had you asked before your started I would have told you not to use shrimp to cycle. You have no control over the creation of ammonia that way and the control pf ammonia is how one cycles a tank.

Maybe somebody else on the site has done it as your are doing it and can help.

Here is what Dr. Timothy Hovanec who discovered and even patented some of the bacteria in tanks has to say on the subject:

Using shrimp or fish food​

One of the more popular fishless cycling methods is to buy a few dead shrimp at the grocery store, cut them up into chunks and add them to the aquarium. The shrimp decay, which produces ammonia to feed the nitrifying bacteria. There are a few drawbacks with this method, one being that the hobbyist really has no way to know how much ammonia is being produced by the decaying shrimp, and the aquarium does not look very good with dead shrimp laying on the bottom. Also, the organic material of the shrimp can cause bacteria blooms which turn the aquarium water cloudy. This method works but it takes time and patience and you will probably see a spike in ammonia and nitrite if you add a medium to heavy load of fish after the initial cycling. Note that some people use flake fish food instead of shrimp but this is not recommended because flake food does not have much organic material compared to shrimp and so does not add a lot of ammonia to the water, but you can use cut fish instead of shrimp. Hint: to speed up the decay of the shrimp/fish and produce more ammonia, add some DrTim’s Aquatics Waste-Away sludge busting bacteria to the tank.

from https://www.drtimsaquatics.com/resources/fishless-cycling/

 

[fishorama]

I haven't done raw shrimp to cycle, but I did try fish food. It was a rotting mess! & like with shrimp, there isn't a predictable "dose". I tried to guesstimate how much I'd feed if I had a "full amount" fish in the tank.

It sounds like you guessed close to the right amount in you saw at 3-4ppm ammonia. But after nitrite & nitrate show up & ammonia drops, I prefer to ammonia dose to 2ppm...so maybe half your original shrimp mass? But you still need to test, it's too imprecise & high ammonia (over, say, 4ppm) tends to stall cycling.

Your plants, if fast growers & enough of them, may "use up" the ammonia faster than you might think. Test!!

What plants, how many? & what size is your tank? I don't mean very slow growing plants like anubias, moss or ferns. I mean stem plants or maybe floaters.