Tank Cycle

[Parker288]

Just a quick question about a tank cycle. I’ve had this extra tank made up for 8 months but never put anything in it other then microbactor 7. I’m just curious if the tank would Safe to call cycled even without any fish waste or raw shrimp to start it?

thank you!

 

[Garf]

I would have thought that most if not all of the bacteria would have starved off. I think you need to cycle it properly.

 

[nano_ryan]

No. The nitrogen cycle only works because it is a cycle. No fish waste, no cycle

 

[brandon429]

We need to test this it’s important to know the answer, heres how

take a reading of ammonia now as a baseline post pic


next add a few drops of cycling ammonia into the tank, wait five mins and test, until your reading shows a slight, bare increase in ammonia from pic 1. Post pic 2 so we can see the difference between these two readings.
Don’t drive it too high of a change it will take days to come down, a bare change is best, slightly darker on the color scale for pic #2

for pic three, take a reading of ammonia in 24-48 hours and see if matches pic 1 or 2, that’s how we know it it worked on natural feed sources-whether the ammonia stalls or still moves down


if youll take time to produce the test with clear pictures showing movement or no movement of bacteria, that will contribute strongly to evolving cycle science in the hobby. I can link this work to many good cycling threads. I vote they’re alive

 

[brandon429]

A cycling chart is why I bet that way. Those were written before bottle bac was used for cycling, all our stuff comes forty years after those timeframes were known. This tank above is 8x the timeframe a cycling chart shows.


* a certain aspect of this test has already been shown by Dr Reef

he showed bacterial starvation when dosed but not fed in a test vase with a nearly sealed lid, rejected contaminants from the room like dead gnats. Skin cells, aerial dander from pets which is a major source of hidden feed to break down into carbon and other nutrients, and daily cross contamination from bacteria that aren’t aquatic but bloom anyway then die and decay.

nobody has ever tested the open topped full sharing version of this test I’ve seen.