Cycling With/without Fish?

[RobW1983]

Just trying to garner a general concensus from the board, but what is your preferred cycling method?

Admittedly this is my first 'new' tank, but I must say I'm erring on the side of cycling with fish.

Thoughts?

 

[Curiosity101]

Fishless for sure IMO, pretty much I can't see any real justification to cycle a tank fish-in. Fish in is harder on you as a keeper as you must do large daily (sometimes twice daily) changes to keep ammonia and nitrites low enough to keep the fish alive. Even whilst doing that the fish are still being exposed and fish in fish in cycles often don't have the full lifespan that they should.
Also although you can get fish straight away with fish in, but you still don't end up with a fully stocked tank till around 8 weeks later. Which means that although with fishless you have to wait, you don't wait any longer to fully stock a tank.

So even after the negatives of fish in, fishless has a positive, you only have to test the tank water once a day, and pop the ammonia in every few days. The rest of the time you can simply cover it with a blanket and forget about it until the day you go to buy your fish.

I'm not saying fish in isn't do-able, but as a first tank and a new keeper I really wouldn't recommend it.

 

[Wills]

Yeah agree with Curiosity - fishless its so much easier and risk free. I just cant see the point in fish in cycling all it does is force you to choose between hard work or dead or diseased fish and the fishless cycle is just time consuming without fish but at least its not dead fish in a murky tank.

Wills

Yeah agree with Curiosity - fishless its so much easier and risk free. I just cant see the point in fish in cycling all it does is force you to choose between hard work or dead or diseased fish and the fishless cycle is just time consuming without fish but at least its not dead fish in a murky tank.

Wills

 

[AstonN24vantage]

i started with fish in with 2 fancy guppies. worked pretty well. didn't take too long

 

[Katty]

I would say fishless. I'm not saying everyone should feel this way, but I think if you're going to keep animals in your care, you should provide for them the healthiest environment possible and do the best you can to provide for them. I can't really think of a situation outside of an emergency where one should do fish-in instead of fishless. Even if you enjoy doing the excessive water changes and testing needed for fish-in, it's cruel to the fish to expose them to toxins when there is a much easier method to precisely avoid that.

Primum non nocere.
First, do no harm.

 

[Assaye]

I agree with Katty, Wills and C101. Fishless all the way.

I've done various hybrids of fish in cycles for some of my tanks and it's not fun, clever or healthy for the fish. Each time I've been faced with a slight emergency situation OR I've had an excess of mature media. In the latter cases, it isn't really a cycle at all. Add the mature media and a very low stock of fish, test the water and 99% of the time, if you've got the balance right, you have a insta-cycled tank. Get it wrong and you're back to a fish-in cycle. I've only ever tried that method when I have a cycled back-up tank. The former situation isn't good - tank crashes, bullies, broken equipment, etc have at various times meant I needed to do some kind of fish-in cycle and it is not a good situation to be in.

If you can avoid doing harm, do so. If you can't avoid harm, consider whether you are putting the animals into that position for the right reasons.

 

[waterdrop]

Yes, I agree with Assaye, Katty, Wills and C101. Fishless.

I see so many newcomers in the hundreds of cases we do here who look around and get the feeling that its just kind of a one way or the other choice kind of thing. Yet I think the reality is that for any newcomer, the process of cycing is harder than it looks at first and that it often ends up in exposure to the fish. Sometimes it ends up being a bad enough exposure that the beginner loses fish and the beginner is surprised that it was this level of life and death situation for the fish.

In contrast to the fish-in route, the fishless cycle allows the beginner to feel at ease that any mistakes during their period of learning about the nitrogen cycle and their particular tank are not coming at the cost of hurting their fish. The beginner usually doesn't realize how slow the bacteria are to grow and that the period before full normal fishkeeping begins will be a while. Its a subtle difference but I feel that the fishless cycle kind of pushes the beginner to pay attention to and learn a little more about water keeping and that that extra skill is helpful later in the hobby when things go wrong.

Although fishless cycling seems long at the time, its really quite short compared to the years of normal maintenance ahead. Even if a fish-in cycle is done properly, I don't feel it leaves the beginner with as strong an understanding of the filter cycling process on a gut level, and if the fish-in process gets off track it can lead to a lot of extra work and frustration.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[OldMan47]

If you have an existing tank and this is merely the first new one in a while, why not use a sample from one of the existing filters to jump start your new filter. With proper use of a sample of media, you can probably get a fishless cycle finished in about a week.

 

[FISH-FRY]

It's not all doom and gloom. It's not hard to do a fish-in cycle and less work, actually. Start with live plants to help out. You can actually do well with low light and not dousing the plants. Do your research at various places and do what suites your needs.