Finishing up the cycle

One of the first things you learn about when getting in to Aquariums is the importance of cycling a new tank. The process of “cycling” is allowing the tank to establish colonies of beneficial bacteria that process harmful wastes into much less harmful chemicals. It takes time for the right bacteria to land in your tank and set up home there, possibly weeks or months, but there are a few ways to speed things along. Testing the water with a basic test kit is important during this stage, to be able to tell where things are at. The simplest way to cycle a tank is to simply set up the tank and fill it with water, and drop in a few flakes of fish food every day. Allowing the food to rot will produce Ammonia, which the bacteria need to feed on to grow. Cycling a brand new tank this way could take a long time. We can do better than that.

Knowing a friend with an already established aquarium, one could potentially borrow a piece of their filter or even some gravel or rocks from that aquarium and place it in your new tank. The already established bacteria would greatly speed along the process of growing your own colony. Not everyone knows a friend that already has an aquarium setup, though.

Placing a couple of hardy fish like some Zebra Danios in your tank would be a very effective way to cycle as they eat and produce wastes, but this is a bit cruel to the fish, even if they are very hardy. The spikes of Ammonia and Nitrite would stress them out.

There are some products available in aquarium shops such as “Tetra Aquasafe” that are essentially suspensions of these bacterias, which are designed to be added to your new tank when setting it up. A couple fish should be added pretty much immediately after doing this to sustain the new biological filter. Doing it this way should lead to a more or less fully cycled tank in a matter of days.

So which method did I choose? I went with the Aquasafe and adding a few Zebra Danios to my 29 gallon tank. I was testing the water every day, and amazingly, on the very next day I was getting near zero readings of Ammonia (bad) and Nitrite (bad), with a moderate amount of Nitrate (not so bad- this can be removed by changing the water occasionally). I was somewhat surprised that it worked so well, but after all the reading I did, I guess it’s not so surprising.