I think the way forward is to fishless cycle............but then to NOT totally stock your tank. Get some of your fish (the hardier ones) and let them "do the rest" before you fully stock and get the more senstive ones.
That's an awful lot of hassle...it's definitely best for the fish though
What does fish poop give off? Before the fish poop is broken down into ammonia from bacteria? Do we know if its poisonous? Do we also know if it takes a long time for it to happen?
Yeah, this is interesting. The fish waste is not all that different than the fish food (or plant debris for that matter, or dead fish.) Its organic tissue matter in all its complexity. Take the 17 nutrients that plants need its going to be some similar graph where each element is seen in some frequency. Obviously there are lots of carbons, hydrogens, oxygens... sulfer, calcium, magnesium and so on all the way down to the trace metals. Often a trace metal will sit somewhere in the middle of a large complex protein and help it to be an enzyme (think of iron being the "hinge" in the middle of a hemoglobin construct, that sort of thing.) Anyway, all these elements have previously been used by living cells (plants or animals alike) to construct cells and then tissues of cells and now, divorced of their sustaining systems, as dying fish or already dead fish or plants (fishfood) they are slowly breaking apart and being deconstructed by mechanical or physical means. The multitudes of heterotrophic bacteria help this process along, with ammonia being a very prominent result.
I think some of the original guys on usenet who discussed the fishless cycling idea were biochemists or others familiar with bioscience topics and I don't think anyone ever tried to imply that the nitrogen cycle and its components, ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, were the only thing going on in a tank. Its just that its the "critial pathway," if you will, its the slowest and most key component to "bootstrapping" a set of bio-environmental processes that need to be there for higher-order animals like fish to make a go of it. So, for example, the heterotrophic colonies of bacteria that are present in the water column are really just as necessary as the autotrophs we have in the filter, BUT, they are EASY! They can bloom in a matter of hours if the conditions are right. Its the slow autotrophs that are really the limiting factor and thus the focus of the process.
By the way, I don't have anything against fish-in cycling in the larger technical context. When done by an experienced aquarist with the proper low number of fish and sufficiently large and frequent water changes, the gill and nerve damage risk is low. The real problem with fish-in cycling usually comes with beginners having insufficient information or, as is true for experienced people too, simple mistakes or unavoidable errors (person stranded away from their house and ammonia level rises, etc.) Clearly the most compelling thing about fishless cycling is that it just neatly -removes- the chance of harming the fish (and of course one of the big problems with fish damage is that at milder levels there are simply no symptoms.)
I actually got on here to check on Si's progress. Si, did you switch over to just reporting 12-hour results at some point? When I see a set of results, another piece of info I'm always looking for is whether it represented the 24 or 12 hour result. I saw that a few specific days were mentioned as 12 hour. And I saw that you are back up to dosing 5ppm. It looks like you've only rarely been able to get to pH up in the 8.0 range then? And I assume you're doing a few more of the occasional "reset" type large water changes with recharge of ammonia and bicarb?
Even after several years of this I still find it a head-shaking thing wondering why some cycles seem to so readily finish in a month or so and others want to take 2 months or more. It just begs for some other major factor still undiscovered. Sometimes I think the largest set of variables that none of us really wants to take on is the filter itself and all the media choices. We know that a very wide range of surface types and of fitler designs can work just fine ultimately, but we really don't know if some designs would be much better for quick bacterial growth promotion while others would present factors that blocked growth, who knows?
Anyway, it sounds like Si's bacteria are processing about 5ppm of ammonia and 13ppm of nitrite in 12 hours and leaving only about 0.50ppm on average nitrite left over. The crossover point where a large number of those N-Bacs do one more successful division has to be out there at some day not too far in the future. I always try to remember that this "processing test" is just a surrogate for us to judge the colonies being at a certain level of robustness that won't mini-cycle no matter what sort of first stocking is thrown at it. Seems to me, on all the fishless cycles longer than 50 days or so, the cases where someone has -not- waited it out to double-zeros have -still- been successful after the big water change. Maybe I'm not remembering a few bad cases, but seems like the failures were shorter 30 day type affairs. That's not to say that 12H 00 Qweek is not still the gold standard.
~~waterdrop~~