waterdrop
Enthusiastic "Re-Beginner"
Yes, we had snow this morning in North Carolina.. not very common!
In an after-cycled tank with fish and plants you can definately sometimes get little mini-spikes when you clean the gravel. The disturbance stirs up debris that is in the process of being broken down into ammonia by the heterotrophic bacteria (there can be a hundred species of heterotrophs doing this, they think.) But in a fishless cycling tank there is usually little debris to cause much of this unless there are a fair number of plant leaves breaking down after they've died. Anyway, if you get a bit of that, don't be disturbed that it has much to do with your fishless cycle, it doesn't (except that you may eventually observe that as your filter matures more and more during the full first year of the tank, it will get faster at clearing any brief thing like this, but most people actually don't even observe any blips above zero.)
Note that the actual reality of trying to find all the specimens you want in your initial stocking can be tricky to time. You'd like to make the most of the opportunity to do a pretty large initial stocking but sometimes your LFS just doesn't have the species you want or the individual specimens don't look like what you want. You just have to make some decisions on the fly, such as whether to "vamp" and just keep adding ammonia for some more days while your LFS gets you in the right ones or whether to go with a smaller stocking and just drag out the process (the waiting two weeks between stocking additions and all that) longer in the end.
~~waterdrop~~
In an after-cycled tank with fish and plants you can definately sometimes get little mini-spikes when you clean the gravel. The disturbance stirs up debris that is in the process of being broken down into ammonia by the heterotrophic bacteria (there can be a hundred species of heterotrophs doing this, they think.) But in a fishless cycling tank there is usually little debris to cause much of this unless there are a fair number of plant leaves breaking down after they've died. Anyway, if you get a bit of that, don't be disturbed that it has much to do with your fishless cycle, it doesn't (except that you may eventually observe that as your filter matures more and more during the full first year of the tank, it will get faster at clearing any brief thing like this, but most people actually don't even observe any blips above zero.)
Note that the actual reality of trying to find all the specimens you want in your initial stocking can be tricky to time. You'd like to make the most of the opportunity to do a pretty large initial stocking but sometimes your LFS just doesn't have the species you want or the individual specimens don't look like what you want. You just have to make some decisions on the fly, such as whether to "vamp" and just keep adding ammonia for some more days while your LFS gets you in the right ones or whether to go with a smaller stocking and just drag out the process (the waiting two weeks between stocking additions and all that) longer in the end.
~~waterdrop~~
Any ideas?
l
