Ultimate Article- Cycling Your Tank

Okay, that is it. From now on if someone wants to talk cycling tanks they had better read this first...

Absolutely everything I can find from some pretty heavy duty research hours...

What Is Cycling and Why Should I Do It?
When we talk about cycling a tank we are not asking you to take your tank out on a nice little jaunt on a bike.
Cycling a tank is the process of beginning the cycle of waste breakdown and conversion to harmless and beneficial products. It is called cycling because of its circular nature. The dangerous chemicals that cycling deal with are Ammonia, Nitrate and Nitrite. There are other cycles that exist in a tank as well, such as an Oxygen cycle and a Phosphate cycle but these cycles are generally overlooked or generalized over in favour of dealing with the Nitrogen cycle.
The reason you should cycle a tank is so that your fish will live longer, look better and be happier. The perfect tank would be its own little environment with its own recyclable water, plants and water life with no intervention from us just like a mini world going on in a cube. We would have no need to top up the water because the water would never really leave this little world and anything that died would just naturally recycle back into the ecosystem. Plants would feed from the waste and decayed life and everything would be wonderful and in balance. There are many websites around that talk of this type of micro-environment.
See http://www.eco-sphere.com/care_manual.htm for an article on Eco-Spheres.
Okay now back to reality. While we can get close to this type of aquarium, it is almost impossible to have it exactly as the ideal.
What we can do is minimise the amount of work an aquarium can have for us.

What Is The Cycle?
The cycle we talk of is commonly called the Nitrogen Cycle. The reason for this is because Ammonia's (NH3) composition is one Nitrogen atom to three Hydrogen atoms (if the water has a lower pH than 7 then the Ammonia becomes Ammonium with an extra Hydrogen atom so it is NH4- this form of Ammonia is much less harmful to fish), while Nitrite (NO2) is one Nitrogen atom to two Oxygen atoms and Nitrate (NO3) is one Nitrogen atom with three Oxygen atoms. As you can see, as the cycle progresses different atoms adhere to the Nitrogen.

What Causes Ammonia/Ammonium To Rise In A Tank?
There are a number of things that contribute to your tanks Ammonia/Ammonium. The key things that contribute to it are:
1. The water from your tap in the form of Chloramine, which is NH2Cl (Nitrogen plus 2 Hydrogen atoms and 1 Chlorine atom). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloramine
2. Fish waste. If it eats, it excretes and excreta is basically Ammonia with extras.
3. Uneaten food. In itself not high in Ammonia. However, as the food breaks down it begins to convert to Ammonia and other chemical byproducts.
4. Dead plants/fish. Both of these things rapidly break down into a tasty chemical soup.

How Do I Lower the Ammonia Levels?
As your levels rise in the tank a bacteria that exists everywhere called Nitrosomonas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrosomonas) begins to convert the Ammonia. The more it converts the more of itself it produces until all the Ammonia is consumed by this first bacteria. This causes the levels of Ammonia to drop. If more Ammonia is introduced to the tank the Nitrosomonas will again start oxidizing/feeding and reproducing. There is some information on the web stating that in fact the bacteria responsible for converting the Ammonia is one called Nitrosococcus though generally information talks mostly about Nitrosomonas. Both of these are in the same genera so are closely related.

So Where Does The Ammonia Go?
The Nitrosomonas "eat" the Ammonia by oxidizing it and their consumption alters the chemical makeup of the water, converting it to Nitrite (NO2) laden water. Essentially the bacteria strips the Hydrogen from the Nitrogen then sticks the Nitrogen and Oxygen together to form the Nitrite the same as water oxidizes iron into rust.

Now I Have A Tank Full of Nitrites and Nitrosomonas- What Happens Next?
With all that Nitrite sitting around in the tank the next thing that happens is that another bacteria starts to grow. This bacteria is called Nitrobacter (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrobacter). The Nitrobacter oxidizes the Nitrite and this provides them their energy to reproduce so once again a chemical change occurs, the levels of Nitrites drop as the Nitrobacter feed and this time we are left with Nitrates. Once again, there is some information on the web that states that Nitrospira are what actually convert the Nitrites but once again they are in the same genera as Nitrobacter and so are related. See http://www.thetropicaltank.co.uk/cycling2.htm for more on this subject.

What Eats All This New Nitrate I Have In My Tank Now?
A number of things eat Nitrate. Algae likes to consume Nitrates as do your aquarium plants. It is not unusual for new tanks that have plenty of light to succumb to algae bloom primarily owing to the Nitrates and lighting. If your lighting is low then it is unlikely you will get algae to any great degree in your tank. You may even want to promote it a little for any algae eating fish you have. Having algae does not mean your tank is "sick", in fact it is quite healthy. If you do not like the thought of algae in your tank this is the time when you would begin water changes to lower the Nitrate levels in your tank.

Water Changes Are Only To Stop Algae?
Water changes lower the Nitrates which might otherwise rise to dangerous levels for fish, though the Jury is out as to what constitutes "dangerous".but probably no higher than 10ppm. Water changes will also often remove excess food particles, excess fish waste and provide some oxygenation to the water. Water movement has been shown to assist with natural removal of Nitrates by the breaking down of the adhesion of Nitrogen and Oxygen which then allows these to naturally dissipate into the air.

What Are The Types of Cycling For An Aquarium?
There are two categories of cycling, fish cycling and fishless cycling. Fish cycling involves the use of live fish to introduce the Ammonia into the water in order to begin the Nitrogen cycle. This method involves taking a new tank and adding a number of cheap fish such as Guppies, Goldfish, Tetras, etc to it. Cheap fish are used as the likelihood of losses is quite high. Once the tank has cycled the fish are disposed of either by putting into another tank, adding bigger fish to the tank and using these smaller fish as feeder fish or euthanizing them in some way. The reason these days that the fishless cycle is so heavily promoted is so that these smaller fish are not made to suffer the torture of the cycling. Losses from this are guaranteed since even if they survive the cycling process they are, as stated, then often fed to other fish.

What Are The Methods For Fishless Cycling?
This is where it gets interesting as there are many methods for fishless cycling. I am going to cover the major ones so that you, the reader, have as many options open to you as possible.

The Ammonia Method
The Ammonia method introduces Ammonia into the water over a period of up to 8 weeks depending on the source. This method was designed in 1999 by Dr. Chris Cow, who has a PhD in Organic Chemistry, as a means to provide an alternative to the fish method. See http://malawicichlids.com/mw01017.htm

http://animal-world.com/encyclo/fres...leAquarium.php states using the following method:
1. Introduce pure ammonia to cycle the aquarium. You can buy unscented ammonia with no additives from a supermarket or a bottle of ammonium chloride.
2. Add ammonia from a dropper, 3 - 5 drops per 10 gallons of water per day to get and maintain a reading of 5 ppm.
3. Initially there will be no nitrites. Monitor nitrites daily and continue the daily ammonia dose until you get a nitrite reading. At this point you can reduce the daily amount of ammonia to 2 - 3 drops per 10 gallons. Continue this until both the ammonia test and the nitrite test reads 0 ppm.
4. This method can take as little as three weeks or up to six weeks to complete the nitrification cycle, but adding a starter culture as described above can speed the time up considerably.
5. When the cycle is complete reduce the temperature slowly back to 74 ° to 80 ° F(26 ° - 28 ° C). Reducing it quickly can stress the bacteria.
6. Do a major water change, about 90%, and add activated carbon to remove any possible additives which might have been in the ammonia.

http://www.fishlore.com/NitrogenCycle.htm says to:
Use 100% pure ammonia.
Using a dropper, add 5 drops of ammonia per 10 gallons of aquarium water. If you don't get an ammonia reading with your test kit, add some more drops until you start to see an ammonia reading. Keep track of how many drops you've used so you can repeat this process daily. Continue to dose the tank with ammonia until you start to get nitrite readings with your test kit. Once you can detect nitrites you should only add 3 drops of ammonia per 10 gallons of aquarium water, or if you added more drops originally to get an ammonia reading cut the amount of drops used in half. Continue this process daily until you get nitrate readings with your test kit. Do a 30% water change and your tank is ready.

http://www.bluecrayfish.com/cycle.htm is a bit different. The article on cycling states:
Next, you will add ammonia. You will need to put the ammonia into a clean dropper bottle, if it didn’t come in one. Label that dropper bottle immediately, with the word “AMMONIA” in capital letters. Simply add drops of ammonia until your ammonia reading goes up to 5.0 ppm, which is very high. It took me about 30 minutes of adding ammonia and then testing for ammonia and then adding drops and then testing for ammonia until I got the 5.0 ppm ammonia reading. Keep track of the total number of drops it took for you to get the desired 5.0 reading. After the first day in which you add ammonia, you should test for ammonia and nitrites every day. Then, every day, after testing for ammonia and nitrite, add the same number of drops of ammonia until you see a nitrite reading. On the first day that you actually see a nitrite reading, add half the number of drops of ammonia that you added on the first day, and keep adding that amount every day until you test and have zero ammonia and zero nitrites. At that point, you will need to do a massive water change.

I did a 99% water change, and I still had to do a few more partial water changes the same day, to get rid of the high nitrates in the tank. A fishless cycle uses much more ammonia then would normally develop with other methods, and therefore the leftover nitrates can be quite high. My nitrate reading was 160 ppm when I was done with my first fishless aquarium cycle. Don’t add any pets to the aquarium until your nitrate reading is 10 ppm or less. You can do multiple water changes in the same day, until the desired nitrate reading of 10 or less is achieved. This works because the good bacteria is in the substrate, and in the filter, and remains after the water change. When you have zero ammonia, zero nitrites, and 10 or less nitrates, your aquarium is fully cycled, and ready to house your aquatic pets.

It took me three and a half weeks to accomplish my first fishless cycle. But someone who follows the above recipe, and uses all the tips to speed up the cycling process would probably be able to get it done in 2 weeks.


http://www.aquariumguys.com/freshwat...p-article.html is very similar to other Ammonia methods.
This method takes time, but is simple. Your tank should be completely set up with only the lights off. Now, "feed" bacteria by adding drops of pure ammonia, available and inexpensive at your grocery store (there should be no perfumes or additives). Test your ammonia levels after about half an hour - you want to get them to about 5 ppm.

After about a week, test again. Ammonia should have dropped, while nitrite will now appear. Add more ammonia to get the level back up, then wait another week or so. You may see nitrite spike when ammonia begins to fall - this is a good sign. In a few weeks, your ammonia levels should be dropping more quickly, your nitrite levels should be falling, and you'll see the appearance of nitrate.

At this point you can do a 25% water change, using water conditioner to prep the water. Repeat the process, replenishing conditioned water when it evaporates. Along the way you may see white cloudy water - these are bacterial blooms and will go away within weeks. Eventually you will have 0 ammonia and 0 nitrite, with low nitrate levels. At this point your tank is cycled.

Almost every site I visited had the same basic details for the method.
1. Using pure Ammonia get your water reading up to 5ppm of Ammonia.
2. Add more at intervals.
3. Change water.
Some sites recommend changing various amounts of water during the process, some only at the end of the process.

The Feeding Method
This involves feeding your empty tank with fish food.
From http://animal-world.com/encyclo/fres...leAquarium.php again:
1. You simply feed the tank with a fish food, presumable daily to keep an ongoing decomposing process. As the food decays it will to produce ammonia and get the biological filter started.
2. This method takes about the same amount of time as the fish method above.
3. The main drawback to this method is that it is difficult to get a large enough initial bacteria colony. So when you introduce the fish, they may add a larger ammonia load than the colony can handle. Consequently you may get some additional ammonia and then nitrite spikes, though they should be less dramatic and shorter lived than the initial cycling spikes.
4. Another drawback is that the decaying food, besides producing ammonia, can add other by-products such as phosphates.

http://www.fishlore.com/NitrogenCycle.htm simply says:
Using Fish Food
Drop in a few flakes every 12 hours. As the food decomposes it will release ammonia. You will have to continue to "feed" the tank throughout the process to keep it going.

As Animal World stated getting the Ammonia levels high enough to cycle your tank properly may be more difficult than using pure Ammonia and it may take longer to cycle your tank.

The Raw Prawn Method
This method involves the use of raw prawns or fish that you simply drop in and allow to rot down in the tank.
Back to the Fishlore website which states:
Use a small piece of raw fish or a raw shrimp
Drop a 2 inch by 1 inch chunk of raw fish or a raw shrimp into the tank. As it decomposes it will release ammonia into the tank.

Personally, I am not sure as to how pleasant an idea this may be with a piece of rotting flesh in your tank but there are a number of people who swear by it.

The Seeding Method
What many sites offer you in addition to the Ammonia Method is the Seeding Method. Seeding can be a great process in and of itself.
The basics of this method amount to the following:
1. Gather material from an established tank such as gravel, filter material, plants and decorations.
2. Purchase active biological material that comes in bottles kept cool to slow down the death of the bio matter. This often has an extremely short shelf life.
3. Place items in tank and cycle the tank using the seeding material and one other method.
As an alternative, just use the seeding method alone. The reason for the success of this method is because most of the work is done for you already owing to the active population of Nitrosomonas and Nitrobacter already present in the seeding material. The only thing you have left to do is to build up the quantities of these two bacteria so they can deal with your bio-load (the amount of fish you stock in your tank). This is probably the single most important step helping you cycle your tank as you can probably start to populate your tank in as little as 1-2 weeks (always test for the 3 Nitrogen types before doing so).
The following sites are just a few that talk about the seeding method:
http://animal-world.com/encyclo/fres...leAquarium.php
http://www.fishlore.com/NitrogenCycle.htm
http://www.bluecrayfish.com/cycle.htm
http://www.aquariumguys.com/freshwat...p-article.html
http://www.tropicalfishcentre.co.uk/Fishlesscycle.htm
http://www.algone.com/fishless_cycling.php
http://www.aquariumadvice.com/articl...cle/Page1.html
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/faustus...a/fishless.htm
http://www.aquariumsecrets.com/Fishless.htm
http://www.cichlid-forum.com/article...ss_cycling.php
http://aquamaniacs.net/forum/cms_vie...cle.php?aid=31

My Water Went Cloudy- What Does It Mean?
Depending on when it went cloudy and what colour it is will tell you what it means.
http://www.fishlore.com/CloudyWater.htm provides a good list of what each means but breaks down into the following:
WHITE
If this occurs shortly after first setting up then it is most likely particulate matter from the gravel.
If this occurs some time after you have set up the tank (2-6 weeks for example) then this is most likely a bacterial bloom. It will settle down as the tanks cycle continues.
GREEN
Most likely algal bloom. This is caused by there being an overabundance of food for the algae. Do some water changes, lower the light levels or lower the amount you feed your fish, you may need to do all three if you want to combat your green water. If none of this works then as a last resort you can use an anti-algae treatment but be careful as some algae treatments use copper which can be harmful to invertebrates.
YELLOW
This can be caused by things like driftwood leaching out its tannins or even coloured dyes leaching out of gravel. It can also be caused by fish waste and other dissolved organic carbons (DOC). Generally water changes will fix both of these. Some driftwood can take months to leach out their tannins so do not despair if this is what is turning your tank yellow. If it is off-putting you can always take out the offending wood and boil it for a few hours, changing the water every hour until no more colour leaches out. The best way to deal with fish waste and DOC is to vacuum it out of the tank during water changes and not overfeed your fish.

There are many variations on the methods I have outlined above for dealing with your Nitrogen Cycle but I hope I have provided readers with a better idea of what to do. Feel free to provide me information with some of your variations you may have used and whether they were successful or not.

LL
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