22-08-2003, 10:43 PM
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Include plants when cycling tank?
) wrote:
Why would you need fishless cycling in the first place?
Although I wouldn't have put it exactly like that, I've got to agree
that when it comes to general planted tanks, fishless cycling isn't
usually necessary. Plants prefer ammonium first as a food source over
nitrate, so it's a great way to start a tank with fish from day 1 (as
long as you set it up properly so the plants thrive, or else the whole
system could collapse.)
But anyway, fishless cycling certainly does have a place, IMO, in some
non-planted tanks or special situations where you need to add a large
bio-load all at once, as someone else already mentioned. In specific,
many newbs setting up community tanks make the mistake of assuming
plants are difficult, time-consuming, or expensive, so they start out
with plastic. And since they're the ones most likely to create an
over-crowded, toxic-waste dump in a tank with their impatience and
greed, mentioning fishless cycling at every turn in hopes that they'll
read about it before killing a bunch of fish isn't all that bad of a
policy, IMO.
And key here against your arguments in other posts that fishless
cycling has no place at all in the hobby is the impatience and greed
for lots of fish that most newbies exhibit. Despite being warned over
and over about not stocking too quickly or overcrowding while doing
fish-cycling, a huge amount of them do it anyway, as evidenced by the
non-stop "why are my fish dying" posts in r.a.f.m. If we can just get
them to add a starter culture of bacteria and finish the cycle with
ammonia and not fish (done the right way, this takes as little as 1-2
weeks in my own personal experience doing cycling experiments for Bit
Nybbler a few years ago,) then a lot of the problems we see can
usually be minimized.
...why not run your filter on another tank a few weeks first,
then slap it on the new tank when you add the fish?
Because after that, neither filter will have a full bacterial culture
at the end of that time since they're splitting the food source, so
it's not a total solution. The new filter would have a starter
culture, but it would probably still need to be cycled some more in
order to handle the full bio load of another tank. And spending a
week or two doing this with ammonia rather than live fish in some
cases might be preferable, especially when starting with sensitive
fish like corys and no plants. People aren't cut out with
cookie-cutters, and neither are their fishkeeping situations; there
are plenty of times this would be a useful method.
And plus, the fishless cycling method is usually targeted specifically
for newbies, who often don't have other tanks of their own or friends'
tanks to do this on or get cultures from. And if your only local pet
store is something like Petco, which is becomming more commonplace as
LFS's go out of business, don't count on them giving you doo-doo from
their own tanks (no pun intended.) If they want to insure they don't
kill fish in a cycling, plantless tank, this might be the most
comfortable way for them to do it. They don't even have to cycle it
all the way, even, so they can combine methods to shorten the time
even further.
As an aside, another minor bit of information (since someone mentioned
something about adding huge amounts of ammonia somewhere along this
thread) is that you don't have to add tons of ammonia for
plantless/fishless cycling. All you have to do is make sure that you
constantly have _measureable amounts_ while cycling. Having 5ppm vs
..5 ppm won't make the bacteria grow any faster. So that's not a
problem.
See ya,
Kristen
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