Stumpy wrote:
I set up a small aquarium and used de-chlor. Waited a week and bought a
goldfish. After one week it had Ich, used malachite green and raised tank
temperature to 80 deg., it recovered. Then at it's 2 week mark the goldfish
looked ill and had its tail corroding - I assumed with tailrot. Took a
water sample to a petstore and wanted to buy an anti-biotic. The aquariaist
said that the sample had high ammonia and that it was not tailrot, would
not sell the antibiotic. The fish died that night.

http://fins.actwin.com/mirror/begin-cycling.html

My question is - with no fish in the tank to continue producing nitrogen,
will the cycle shown in the graph on the link above continue as depicted?
Or will the cycle be interrupted until I install a new fish to produce new
nitrogen? My preference would be to leave the tank alone until day 40 and
then feel much better about putting in a new fish.

Could not find a group where this would be on-topic, but it is related.


Your tank won't continue cycling if there is nothing in there to produce
waste. You could possibly continue cycling the tank without fish using a
procedure known as "fishless cycling" - this is where you add small
amounts of ammonia to the tank and continue testing as if there are fish
in there - once you reach zero nitrites and ammonia your tank will be
cycled - never tried it myself but there are a lot of people who swear
by this technique as it doesn't involve any stress to fish.

A good place to ask any of your questions is:-

http://groups.google.com/group/The-F...m?lnk=li&hl=en

HTH

Gill