How Effective Is It To Seed A New Tank?

[tgo]

Hi everybody, I was hoping somebody could offer some advice. I just setup an old 15 gallon tank yesterday and had some questions about properly starting it up with a small stock of fish. I have an extra sponge that I put in my existing filter setup to seed this new tank. I have read that I could wait 24 hours to let the temperature and water stabilize before I can add some fish. I thought I add the established media to the new tank when I add the new fish. I was hoping that the tank would be instantly cycled with a low bioload of fish and no feeding for a day or two, then feeding very little.

I would like to add 3 cherry barbs, do you think this is too many? Does this sound like a good idea?

Thanks

 

[kelly528]

Yes, seeding a tank is quite effective, just make sure you seed it while the fish are in. If you seed it, for example, the night before, the bacteria will have starved for lack of ammonia/nitrite and died hours before you put your fish in.

 

[waterdrop]

Totally agree. Let it stabilize and then do the fish intro and the mature media transfer closer together (although, just as an aside, not very many bacteria would die off in only 24 hours) and then treat it as a Fish-In Cycling situation. You have to remember that no media transfer is totally guaranteed as the bacteria may get disturbed and shut down sometimes... but the vast majority of times its a pretty solid process. You can take up to 1/3 of the biomedia out of the old one and its ideal to put it just ahead of the new biomedia in the water path of the new filter.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[tgo]

thanks for the replies, I'll go ahead with the plan