Very New Fish Enthusiast

[PaulieB]

Hello everyone. I'm very very new to the fish life adventure. Any input would be wonderful, but please go easy on me. I'm sure this has been posted before a million times, but I'd like to make it a million and one.

I recently was lucky enough to get a tank from my girlfriend's mother. Its a 10 gallon glass tank. I filled it with water and was able to get 2 gallons of water from a well established tank to mix in. I used water conditioner and did most of the necessary steps to start a tank. How long do you think it will take until the bacteria starts? Its been in operation for about a week, but the filter was in my smaller 5 gallon tank before that for about 2 weeks. I have a mystery snail, named Bruce haha, that has been in there and hes been less active lately. I also went to Petsmart and was thinking about getting a goldfish or 2 to help speed up the cycle. I know they are strong fish. The fish person there said not to get them because they would end up creating too much ammonia and would cause me more problems. She asked me about the tank and I told her what I just told you above. I told her ultimately I would like guppies in my tank. She insisted I get 2 guppies to try out in there. I did. I put them in last night. I floated the bag for 20 or so mins before putting them in and used stress coat. They seemed happy swimming crazily around in there. Now when I check on them today I see they are both hovering at the bottom back left corner. Is something wrong or are they still adapting?

P.S. I apologize for any grammatical errors.

 

[Bebobb]

Even though guppies are stong fish, and often used for fish-in cycles, they still have the risk of dying during the cycle. So you might expect some casualities. How long has the mystery snail been in the tank? The mystery snail will deffinately produce a bit of ammonia to start the cycle.

I'm surprised that you got someone at a fish store to talk to you about cycling a tank! That truly surprises me. Water from a mature tank contains none of the beneficial bacteria that you need for a tank. Instead, you should try to get some filter media from an established tank. That will deffinately speed up cycling a lot! And, it would reduce stress on the guppies and snail that you have in the tank right now.

I hope I helped some with out being confuzzling!

 

[Assaye]

Beginners' Resources

Fish-In Cycle

Read these

What happens now is this:

The fish and snail produce waste. The most dangerous part of that is ammonia. Your filter needs time to grow bacteria to process the ammonia into nitrite and even more time to process the nitrite into nitrate.

If you leave the filter and the fish alone, this process will probably be complete within 2 weeks to a month. However, you'll also probably end up killing the fish in the process.

In order to save the fish but keep the bacteria growing, you need to do water changes. Normally, you'd only do about 25% a week but when a tank is cycling, as yours is, you need to do them much more frequently.

The best thing you can do now is get a liquid test kit that tests for at least ammonia and nitrite, and ideally nitrate, pH and hardness (GH and KH).

With your test kit, you can test the water every day for ammonia and nitrite and if either of them are about 0.25 ppm (parts-per-million), you need to change enough water to get it back to 0 (try to limit it to about 75% at a time, though - if you need to do more, spread it over two back-to-back water changes rather than doing 100%). You need to keep testing and doing water changes until both ammonia and nitrite stay at zero for several days and nitrates are rising.

Once you've done that, your tank has enough bacteria for the current fish. You need to repeat this process for any new fish you add.

If you want to speed things up, get some mature sponges from someone else with a tank. Adding old tank water won't help as it contains very, very tiny levels of bacteria.

 

[Shelby]

I actually saw a list somewhere on this board about people willing to donate mature media. I'm sure one of the long time members know exactly where it is and could point you in the right direction. Make sure you are doing water changes for the fish-in cycle to keep ammonia down. Hopefully the guppies make it Good luck!