Good morning Mark and Welcom to TFF!
I've just had a look through your attractive blog and enjoyed your pictures. I see that you've had a friendly start here and a nice beginning discussion about your stocking plans - that's great and it should continue to be an ongoing thing.
What doesn't seem to have come up, unless I've missed it, is that you are slipping right on into a few of the misunderstandings that are extremely easy for beginners to make, given that the real skills of fishkeeping are fairly arcane and not written about well in books and certainly not communicated well in local fish shops.
It appears that after taking a fairly careful approach to your hardware (good!) and careful initial setup, you've made a choice about "cycling" with little fanfare and launched off putting food into the water. What this shows, in my experience, is that you've not lucked into being exposed yet to the full importance of understanding the topic of the Nitrogen Cycle, the topic of Fishless Cycling and the whole water chemistry aspect of the hobby.
While its true that putting fish food in a freshly started aquarium will begin to start the cycling process, it is far from the ideal method. The reason is that using food gives you very little control over measuring and understanding the progress of the cycle. The fishfood method can be extremely useful in the unusual situation where the aquarist wants to start cycling a tank but needs to leave on a week or two vacation, but for the normal situation where the aquarist plans to be there running the process, the normal household ammonia method is by far the best.
There are several critical things for you now. First order of business (and maybe you've already done this!) is to find and read a number of the pinned articles at the top of our "New to the Hobby" forum here. If you can search and find Miss Wiggles profile, she has links (they're in every one of her posts) to a good setup article, to things about the nitrogen cycle and to our main working article for Fishless Cycling by member rdd1952. There's overlap but another way to get to various articles is by going in to "Beginners Resource Center" and then Cycling Resource Center and watching for articles by Miss Wiggle and AlienAnna among others.
Personally, I think its important to understand that the process of doing a fishless cycle in a "social" way via your thread postings here on TFF is a fabulous way of learning a bunch of the most basic central skills of the hobby in a kind of intense immersion way. Its also a lot of fun asking questions in your thread and reading other beginners threads at the same time.
As you may know, when you bought your filter and set it up with the media in it, it was just a raw kit of hardware, not really ready to do its job for the fish, despite it being assembled and running properly. The reason is that it does not have the exact two species of bacteria that we need grown in it yet. It can take anywhere from 3 weeks to 3 months for this bacteria to grow and begin functioning properly. These beneficial bacteria need to form sticky "biofilms" all over the surfaces of the filter media. The sticky biofilms are the home for these crucial bacteria which will then constitute a "biofilter", one of the three functional categories of filtration. A second category is "mechanical" filtration and the sticky biofilms will also finalize that function in the filter by making the media a better trap for debris. The third function: "chemical" filtration, is only needed in certain special cases, such as to clear out medications, so we don't need to worry about it now.
You will be reading about the Nitrogen Cycle, which is fascinating and can occupy your interest for a long time to come. Basically, the fish will give off ammonia (our lungs give off CO2, their gills give off ammonia when they "respire") and fish waste. The fish waste, along with excess food and plant debris will be converted quickly by "heterotrophic" bacteria (different ones, not our beneficial ones) into more ammonia. Ammonia, even in trace quantities, is toxic to fish because it permanently damages their gills. The first of our good bacteria, the ammonia oxidizing bacteria (let's call them the A-Bacs) will convert this ammonia into nitrite (NO2), and multiply it 2.7 times in the process.
Our second bacterial species, the nitrite oxidizing bacteria (Let's call them N-Bacs) will eat this nitrite and convert it into nitrate(NO3), again multiplying the volume of the nitrogen carrying substance. The nitrite(NO2) is also highly toxic to fish like ammonia, but in this case its because it suffocates the fish, causing permanent nerve damage. The nitrite is able to attach to the same sites that oxygen would on the hemoglobin cells in the fishes blood.
So the "biofilter" is really a fancy biological piece of equipment that you have to "create" and once created, will continue to do the job of very rapidly converting the two most toxic dangers to fish into this third substance, nitrate(NO3), which is not nearly so toxic and which can be diluted to safe levels via weekly water changes. The water changes are critical to aquarium maintenance because they dilute not only the NO3, but also dozens of other trace toxins that we can't afford or don't have time to test for but are there building up all the time.
OK, hope that peaks your interest enough to get you started. Your next task will be to clear up whether you've got all the right testing kits and to begin asking questions about "real" fishless cycling for your new tank.
~~waterdrop~~
