Cycling With Or Without Plants - Debating The Merits Of Each

[TwoTankAmin]

daize- I thought we had put it to rest as well. You brought up Clive and his comments. Those comments are only mostly pertinent to heavily planted higher light tanks. His knock on Tropica is another story.
 
Further I do not agree with your conclusions about tanks with lots of slower growing type plants. When one fills a tank with these types of plants there is an affect on the fish stocking levels that are possible. Reduce the potential fish load and you reduce the need for bacterial colonies in terms of their size. Consider what species of fish have the highest waste and ammonia output and see how many of them we find in heavily plants tanks. This entire thread really has to do with the fish even though it is about plants. the goal of cycling a tank with or without plants is to make it safe for the fish. So i find it impossible to separate the two. I had fewer and smaller fish in my high tech planted 50 gallon tank than I had in many smaller tanks with fewer or no plants.
 
So I am going to try yet again to explain it to you. Fill up a tank as you describe, you pick the plants to insure they are as far from high light and what you consider to be important silent cycle plants as you like. Just limit the selection to the sorts of plants the average fish keeper doing their first planted tank might select. And when you are all done and the plants are in the tank without any ferts added, and no supplemental co2 either, and let them settle in for 2 weeks, and then do this:
 
Dose sufficient ammonia to reach 2 ppm and then test in 24 hours. If you get 0/0, fully stock the tank. If you get some low level of ammonia and/or nitrite. You can likely do one more ammonia dose when things are near 0 and that will do the trick and you can fully stock. If you don't want to bother with more additions, you can do a gradual stocking and this will let the tank finish up on its own. You can likely fully stock, but play it safe and do 2/3-3/4 stocking. If this is a bit too much, the ammonia and nitrite levels should still be low enough as not to cause harm and they will zero out pretty fast.
 
If you test between .5 ppm and 1 ppm of ammonia, you have a ways to go and another ammonia dose is in order for sure- 2 ppm again. Or you can again opt not to add more ammonia and start stocking. But now you need to consider only doing a 1/2 stocking and then doing a couple of more additions over the next 4-6 weeks. Finally if you read ammonia at over 1 ppm, the plants and any bacteria are not really enough and more bacteria is certainly needed. So you will have to do more than one or two additions likely. The choice to add some fish right away and finish stocking over time or to wait until fully "cycled" and add them all in one go is up to the fish keeper.
 
All of this assumes one has done nothing else to get bacteria into the tank. But I wonder how many people will fill a tank heavily with slow or fast growing plants for their very first tank. they are likely working and their second or third tank. So the odds are they can do some seeding easily and head off this problem from day one. They are able to have a close to instantly cycled tank. And from the perspective of this thread, there is nothing to discuss.
 
My point is that sometimes an ammonia dose doesn't just serve to cycle a tank. It can also serve as a diagnostic test which gives us an idea of the capability of the tank to handle ammonia etc. This diagnostic test replaces a big fat book about every plant out there and how much ammonia it might consume or if ammonia can harm it. Nor do we get our plants with a label stating they contain X nitromonas, Y nitrospira etc. But none of this really matters. What matters is how fast the tank processes 2 ppm of ammonia.
 
Just as an fyi, my best guess is if this discussion were about a Walstad tank, the amount of ammonia I would suggest one dose and test with is about .5 ppm. The fish load in her tanks are so minimal the tanks are likely good to go for that fish load as soon as they are set up and planted. In the end, as far as I am concerned, this discussion is really not about the plants, it is about the fish and what it takes to insure they are safe.
 
Go to the Barr Report Forum and there are some 29 sub forums directly dealing with in tank issues. 28 are plante related and one is Inverts- not one are for discussing fish. Now head onto any site about fish. Check out theplantedtank.net. They have a single sub-forum for Fish and one for inverts. Whether its sites like this one or AquariaCentral, or its a more specialty type site, what you will see is many sub forums about fish and at least one and usually several about plants. This site has fw fish, sw fish, critters in both and then it has a decent planted tank section. Most specialty sites for species which don't eat plants, will have some space devoted to plants that work with such fish. To me this points up a major difference in how one approaches the hobby.
 
Think about this in relation to the lovely tank you recently set up. I am willing to bet dollar to donuts when you were planing it you decided about the scape and the plants first and then picked fish that worked with it. I doubt you started out saying you wanted specific fish and then what plants and scape would be the best for them. Am I worng? Andplease do not misunderstand and take what I am say is that plant people don't care about fish. This is not the case at all.

 

[daizeUK]

Fill up a tank as you describe, you pick the plants to insure they are as far from high light and what you consider to be important silent cycle plants as you like. Just limit the selection to the sorts of plants the average fish keeper doing their first planted tank might select. And when you are all done and the plants are in the tank without any ferts added, and no supplemental co2 either, and let them settle in for 2 weeks

Why not add CO2 right from the start? Most planted sites including Tropica give advice to add CO2 straight away. I don't see anywhere that says you shouldn't add CO2 for low-light plants. On the contrary CO2 is usually advisable for any planted tank and especially for people like me with hard water who have to work harder to get more CO2 to the plants.

I think there is an automatic inference here that CO2 = high light, heavily planted and experienced keepers. I don't agree. There is a lot of advice out there telling beginners that they can get more luxuriant growth with CO2 regardless of what lighting or plants they have. Beginners are using CO2 - the OP who started off this discussion is proof of that.

The tank you describe is essentially my 120L - I wonder how it would have gone if I had added 2ppm instead of 4ppm ammonia! I wish I knew because my experience of planted cycling might have been much more positive.

This site has fw fish, sw fish, critters in both and then it has a decent planted tank section.

With due respect to this forum and all the wonderful knowledgeable people who contribute to it, the planted section is a shadow of its former self. The information there is out of date and hasn't been updated in years. None of the former plant experts are regular visitors anymore.

As someone who sits in limbo between wanting a heavily planted tank and healthy fish I often find that I need to go elsewhere for plant advice - and I'm frequently dismayed at how little consideration they give to livestock. That's why I prefer to seek advice here and why I want to discuss heavily planted tanks in this thread. I haven't seen the procedure you just described for ammonia testing on any planted site. From what I've seen they would just tell me to wait a couple of weeks and throw fish in, probably without asking how my tank is planted. They are encouraging fish-in cycles and I think this forum has a golden opportunity to attract planted tank enthusiasts who aren't comfortable with that attitude - plenty of them exist but they tend to get drowned out on the planted forums.

I am willing to bet dollar to donuts when you were planing it you decided about the scape and the plants first and then picked fish that worked with it. I doubt you started out saying you wanted specific fish and then what plants and scape would be the best for them. Am I worng?

My top priority was to choose fish that would be healthy in my local water conditions. After that I gave equal consideration to plants and fish, knowing both the scape I wanted and which fish I liked. Fortunately for me I think they happened to work together! No I'm not jaded enough to pick fish to suit the scape yet - it's my first real aquascape for Heaven's sake, give me a few years experience and maybe I'll be chucking in Ember tetras with the rest of them

Meanwhile I am gathering information about the effect of excess phosphates on algae growth. I still think that it might be relevant to this discussion but if nobody agrees then I can take it to a new thread.

 

[TwoTankAmin]

I suggested no co2 to keep it uncomplicated. If you want you add the co2 to my example, I do not object or argue against this. But when looking at folks with planted tanks of all shapes and sizes, most of them do not supplement gas, at best, they may use something like Excel. Moreover, while any planted tank can benefit from co2 supplementation, many tanks will be fine without it. Only the more demanding setups must have it. Believe it or not, slower growth can be a blessing. It means one does less pruning and replanting of things, it means plants will not outgrow a shallower tank as fast. A lack of added co2 does not necessarily mean a planted tank can not still look nice.
 
Tanks and the wild are way far apart in how they operate. In the wild excess phosphate, nitrate or ammonium can and do cause algae blooms. The usual source of these things is man made such as fertilizer runoff etc. On this scale dealing with this issue clearly is not how we can do things in tank. When one gets to the heavily planted tanks you see folks advised to do a couple of large water changes a week in order to reset the tank for the benefit of the plants. This controls things better in terms of nutrients and excesses. In nature you get the algae bloom. So when I hear the plant maven say excess P and NO3 don't cause algae, it reminds me of when folks say nitrification stops when the pH goes to low. It  may appear to do so in a tank, but the fact is in nature there is nitrification going on even at pH 4.0. It just requires the bacteria adapt and this takes time. So while we can tell new hobbyists that letting the pH drop to low will stall of crash their cycle, it is not correct to state this as nitrification stops. P and NO3 are not a problem if one does what it takes to prevent this.
 
As for the folks leaving the planted area, they did not leave all that long ago (July/Aug 2012). Are you saying that the planted tank methodologies have changed radically since then? I would say, when they were here, what did they do to change the outdated information you say is there? The cycling article here was in the exact condition you described. It took a pretty long hard battle to get it changed. In fact, it did not get changed until those very same people left the site. Moreover, since this is a general fish site, that should mean it covers a lot of topics but none in serious depth. Most fish keepers who become seriously involved with specific species etc. often turn to specialty sites for information and help. This applies to plants the same as fish species. Discus folks use discus sites, catfish folks use planetcatfish or scotcat, plant folks use planted tank sites, etc. This site is intended to have basic information on everything but serious in depth information on nothing. The one thing we do have here is a lot of folks new to the hobby.
 
And when I said you chose your fish to work with the plants and scape, of course you, or anyone else, has to consider their parameters. If you had no plants at all you would still have done this. The advice in this respect is always to do fish that work with one's tap water rather than altering one's parameters. Your water is your water, you have no choice about what comes out of a tap. But the plants in one's tank are not there for any other reason than they are what the fish keeper chose to put in the tank. So this is not what I meant. I am reasonably sure you could have put a bristlenose pleco into that tank, but if you chose to do so a lot of those lovely plants would be floating bits. If you had gone with clown pleco, a nice fish for a smaller tank, and your lovely wood arrangement would have been ground down over time. So both these fish would have had to have been ruled out as tank inhabitants because of what they would have done to the plants and scape not because they would not work in your water parameters.
 
Another example would be the same bn. If I want a sword plant in a tank with a bn, I would avoid choosing an amazon sword or cultivar of these because when the bn rasps algae off of leaves, the amazons get damaged due to their more delicate leaves. In a tank with a bn one should pick a different sturdier sword and not have delicate foreground plants either. In a tank where one picks the amazon sword, they should consider choosing a different pleco. This is what I mean about how one selects fish because the plants and scape are the main consideration of the tank. This is a completely different approach than when one says I really want to get these fish and when I do I want to have a tank set-up to best suit their needs.
 
This is a very broad hobby with all kinds of interesting nooks and crannies to explore. For example, come and look at my pleco tanks. Most of them are bare bottom, filled with rocks and wood and the light is only on when I work in the tank. But if you back up in time you would observe that every one of those tanks started off with plants in them when first set-up. The plants were in there for one reason, to help prevent ammonia/cycling issues in the tank. they provided back up to the bacteria. Once the tank settled in, the plants were removed over time.
 
Or lets consider the issue of adding ammonia to a newly set up tank with plants compared to a new tank being cycled without plants. How many of the latter tanks routinely deal with diatoms or other algae? People are told this is common and they will eventually go away. But if we have a tank with some plants and we are dosing ammonia to finish cycling it and this tank gets some diatoms or even some algae, this is now something horrible? Again my personal experience is that I can add ammonia to a planted tank to keep it cycled when the fish have been removed. This is intended to keep it stable for a few weeks pending new fish going in. I have found that I can dose ammonia every few days for a couple of weeks before diatoms or other algae starts to show up. And this is with minimal care taken to do much else. Again, these are not heavily planted tanks with co2 added. They tend to be lower light tanks with anubias, ferns, crypts and stems on occasion. If this was a cycling situation, the amount of ammonia going in would likely be less and would be for a shorter period.
 
And as we all know on those fancy planted sites, none of the newbies there ever have any diatom or algae issues. They just have to follow the simple basic instructions. Except there is an algae forum on all these sites. If the methods and regimens are so easy and simple to follow, why do they need to deal with algae? Should they not have none. Or perhaps it isn't quite as simple and easy as somebody who has been doing sophisticated planted tanks with all the bells an whistles for many years. To me this is like telling a brand new fish keeper to start off keeping discus or to alter their tap parameters. Its hard enough to prevent plant newbies from ending up with non-aquatic plants in a tank let alone having them do this other stuff.
 
Just a note to ian re the links he posted to the Ukaps site- I started to read some of the threads and posts. When I saw how much misinformation was there:
 
"This is relevant to some degree for an un-planted tank, where all of the biological filtration, the process of converting NH3 - NO2 - NO3, is carried out in the filter media." No, much of the bacteria is still in the substrate, just not down very deep, they are in the top 1/2 inch or so.
 
"We also have evidence that many plants preferentially take up NH3 and NO2," I must have read the wrong books and papers because plants take up NH4 not NH3 and they do not readily utilize environmental NO2. Trying to find research on nitrite uptake by plants is difficult. I assume that is because it is not common at all. But I wonder where nitrite in a planted tank would originate unless from bacterial action from a not yet filly established bacterial population.
 
"If I were you I would forego the addition of the rams initially and set up the planted tank as advised by Darrel using something more hardy like tetras instead." No comment needed?
 
"Sensitive species should really be added to mature tanks, mature not being just freshly cycled but stabilized with fish populations already and ideally with healthy plant mass." try this with newly imported altums and you will have a tank full of dead fish in very short order. That sentence should have the word "Some" at the start. Many sensitive fish need the exact opposite of the advice.
 
Or how about suggesting in the pleco thread that one get L-183 for a planted tank. "21 quid for L183? That's ancistrus dolichopterus! They breed like rabbits." As for breeding these fish here is what planet Catfish states: "Breeding: Reasonably straight forward once the correct (black water) parameters are attained." This is not exactly breeding like rabbits when one has to alter water parameters. Even Ingo Seidl states "One of the trickiest Ancistrus species, which can usually be bred successfully only in soft,acid water." (from Back to Nature Guide to L-Catfish, pg 64).
 
So here is a plant site full of good plant advice but h a bunch misinformation on it in other respects. And nobody on that site corrects any of it. But, kudos to Ian for trying to dissuade folks there from doing most plecos in many planted tanks as he is dead on about what they can do to more delicate plants.
 
My advice to folks is when you become involved with an area of fish keeping at a fairly intense level, then a general fish like like this one is not likely to be adequate for your needs and you should locate a specialty site. If you want to do fancy high tech planted tanks and aquascaping, you should rely on a planted tank site not a general fish site. If you want to work with special fish like discus or plecos, go to specialty sites for them. if you want to do a salt water reef tank, a site for this would serve you better. However, if you are just staring out in the hobby, if you need a good grounding in a variety of general issues and methodologies, then this is the prefect place to be. Here you can learn the basics which will serve as your foundation as you graduate to more demanding and complex situations. In some cases you will find more sophisticated information here. it is all a question of the right tool for the job. here you will learn about fishless cycling, on a planted site you will learn how to do a "silent cycle."
 
I would note this is not a knock on this or any other general fish site. It has to do with ones area of interest and level of knowledge on a subject. I am involved with altum angels, if i need help and have questions I know I can not get the answers on a general site, I must go elsewhere. If I want to discuss things with other altums keepers, I can not do that here, I must go elsewhere. This is why the specialty sites exist.

 

[daizeUK]

"And when I said you chose your fish to work with the plants and scape, of course you, or anyone else, has to consider their parameters."

Your 'plant mavens' as you like to call them do not seem to place as much emphasis on suitability of fish as we would here. Yesterday I explained on a plant forum that I don't keep oto's due to local hard water conditions and was told "Yet another error. Fish caring about dH. My Otto's live in very hard water (2nd hardest in UK) and they are fine".

I can't figure out what point it is you are trying to make about me. I happen to like small plant-dwelling fish and I build environments to suit them! If I liked African cichlids then I would be trying to make pretty rock arrangements and I wouldn't have the least interest in plants. I'm not entirely sure what a 'plant maven' is but if you're applying your prejudgements of them to me please stop it!

You said we had a decent planted section. I pointed out that it is in decline, which does disappoint me - but I did not suggest that we needed an in-depth section on plants, or plecos or altum angels for that matter. I agree that silent cycling would be better discussed on a specialist planted site (the guide on this site is rather flakey and I would not dream of taking it as gospel). But fishless cycling with ammonia obviously DOES fall within the realm of this forum.

I've been trying to demonstrate that there are many tanks - INCLUDING some heavily planted and CO2 tanks - which SHOULD be fishlessly cycled or at least tested with ammonia as you described above. All I'm asking is that you do not dismiss these sort of tanks from your planted cycling guide. There is no help for them anywhere else, at least certainly not on the specialist plant forums I would go to. They belong here.

All I'm proposing is that you DON'T make these assumptions:

• there are only a few plants
• there is no CO2
• ferts will not be dosed during cycling

Would it really mean catastrophic changes for your guide? There's no need to go into depth about CO2 or any specialist plant stuff. Just help to stop the misinformation that planted tanks never need to be fishless cycled. A little part of me dies inside every time one of you perpetuates this stereotypically 'plant maven' belief.