Fishless Cycle.... Couple Of Q's On Mine.

[uaeast]

Hi all,
am doing a fishless cycle.

So far it's been 2weeks and the original ammonia is still at around 5ppm!! This normal?

Secondly, I have 2 bits of bigwood in there, and it seems one has a White algae growing on it.
Soft, whiteish and looks like candyfloss. What is it??


Thanks in advance, Joshua.

 

[waterdrop]

Hi Uaeast,

Yes, we see lots of cases where the very first drop of the ammonia from 4-5ppm down to zero ppm takes 2 weeks. The number of cases that hold out for 3 weeks becomes less.

What you see on your bogwood is probably a white fungus colony or a mold or maybe a yeast or water mold. When we fishless cycle and create the correct type of environment to grow the beneficial bacteria we want in the filter, we also are creating the correct environment for many other types of microorganisms.

It turns out that this is perfectly ok the vast majority of the time! The molds and fungi will play out for a little while and then the conditions they need will fade and they will go away, usually all during the fishless cycle. They usually go away fast enough for people but there's nothing wrong with cleaning them off of things with a sponge and water if you were to have your wood out of the tank.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[uaeast]

It's going down slowly, still sitting at about 2ppm! Grr

 

[waterdrop]

I was trying to think how we could picture it... Not sure how many milliliters of ammonia you are putting in... but there are what, 30 drops in a milliliter. A drop of water contains about 2.007x10^22 (20 thousand million million million) molecules. Now I'm probably getting it wrong but might this result in 1,000,000,000 molecules of ammonia when we dose at 5ppm. So let's say we've got two Nitrosomonas bacterial cells and they can process a few hundred of these in a day...