Hi Aquamanis,
Hi Anna, I know you are a keen advocate of fishless cycling as are a lot of people on this forum. I have some questions for you and anybody else who cares to answer. Before anybody jumps down my throat, please note this is not an attack on fishless cycling, merely an unbiased observation.
That's OK, but please remember that often I'm deliberately trying to keep things simple - I don't think newbies want to read a load a scientific paper, they just want to know what to do. Besides, I do actually talk a lot about cycling with fish and have cycled with fish myself so its not like I totally ignore that possibility.
1: Anna, you mention that cycling without fish is much quicker than cycling with fish, how and why do you know this. Have you or anybody else done tests side by side to prove this.
I don't have scientific data to prove this, however its common sense: as CFC said, you can dump a whole load of ammonia in at once (the equivalent of a shoal of large fish) rather than the traditional method of having a couple fish (who obviously don't produce that much ammonia) and gradually increasing the levels.
Most books I've read say that cycling with fish takes anything from 2-6 months to complete. I know you can cycle fishless in a couple of weeks - depending on how you do it, and if you use quite a lot of ammonia you can add quite a lot of fish all in one go when you've finished. It's a matter of ammonia concentration and how many beneficial bacteria you can grow.
2: Are Ammonia, Nitrite and Nitrate the only things somebody should be concerned with when cycling a tank, what about the hundreds of other organisms (besides bacteria) that live with fish.
I've wondered this myself. From the POV of developing the Nitrogen Cycle (which is the most important bit of biochemistry going on in your tank), ammonia, nitrite and nitrate are where its at. Once ammonia and nitrite are at zero, despite an ammonia source (be it fish or articial ammonia), and nitrate is appearing, you know that the beneficial bacteria are doing their work, period.
But you don't know if the pH, KH and GH has absolutely stabilised (particularly if you have bogwood, tufa rock or a peat substrate in there). For certain fish you may need to keep an eye on these parameters for that much longer and if they are particularly sensitive (say discus) you might want to wait a little before adding them. However, I know people who've very successfully added discus to a newly cycled tank (cycled using fishless techniques).
3: Whether a tank has been cycled using fish or not, dosen,t the tank go through more cycling or a minicyle everytime you add fish. Which means the fishless cycle just turned to one with fish.
It depends on the quantity of bacteria in the tank. If you cycle using fishless techniques you can actually grow your bacteria until they have totally colonised the tank to its maximum capacity. When I did this fairly recently I noticed absolutely no ammonia or nitrite spike despite adding a large number of fish at once.
However, if you then add only a couple of fish after fishless cycling, much of that beneficial bacteria will starve and die off. There just wouldn't be enough ammonia from a couple of fish to sustain it. So when you added fish in future, you'd have to go slow to give the bacteria time to catch up.
The fishless technique was devised to enable a person to add a full load of fish immediately. But that isn't always practical or desireable, especially if you're a newbie. So, if you cycle fishless and then add a few danios, waiting a couple of months before adding your expensive shelldweller cichlids, you'd probably be advised to go slow, just as with traditional techniques of cycling. At any time in a tank's history you may potentially get a nitrite or ammonia spike so it always pays to be aware - but if we understand what's happening and
why this is, it should save us from mistakes.
4: It has been suggested by yourself and other people to use, ammonia, urine, etc to start the fishless cycle. I thought you were against the use of chemicals where it can be avoided.
I don't personally count ammonia as a chemical - it is a natural substance produced by fish as their form of urine (land animals release the ammonia locked up in the form of urea or uric acid). All we're doing when we do fishless cycling is to mimic nature.
The problem with a lot of other chemicals people use in their tanks is that the action of these chemicals may not be well understood or may complicate things further. For instance, a pH buffer that is actually a load of phosphates added to your tank. Phosphates feed algae and may have some subtle effects on the immune system of your fish - we're really not sure what high doses of phosphates will do to fish (or humans) and it isn't natural for fish to be swimming around in high levels of phosphates.
Besides, if your fishless cycling works, you shouldn't have any ammonia in the tank by the time you add your fish.
5: If using live fish is an ethical thing, surely the use of live food would be the same.
Ethics are very individual and cultural, but my view is an aware creature should be given more consideration than one who isn't aware. Scientists have proved that fish are a lot more intelligent than they used to think - they can learn, remember and be aware of their carers. Whereas a brine shrimp can mate if you remove its rudimentary brain! (actually, so can some human men but we'd better not go into that
). Fish can sense fear and pain but invertebrates don't actually have the sensory equipment or brain to do so. Nevertheless, I'd be opposed to pulling the legs off of spiders
6: Cycling with fish; Why is something that has been done sucessfully for hundreds of years suddenly frowned upon. I think its like a winning football team, everybody wants to get on the bandwagon.
I didn't say I frowned upon it, I said I thought this new technique is better because it reduces suffering on fish (and suffering on newbies when they cycle with fish wrong and lose all their new stock). I started promoting it because it made logical sense to me - I've sat next to a new tank and watched my fish die one by one (even though I did it "by the book"). It's nice to find a technique that will guarantee that won't happen.
7: What about the bad experiences I,ve read about where people doing a fishless cycle never get thier tanks to cycle properly and end up having to strip it down and start again (usually using fish).
Well I've no idea what they'd be doing wrong because that doesn't even make scientific sense. Were they trying to cycle in a sterile lab somewhere? The only problem is trying to get the bacteria into your tank in the first place, but that's not such a big issue if you pop a live plant or two in there (even if you don't keep the live plant afterwards). I'll give you an example - we recently had a newbie taking forever and a day to cycle his tank. But it turned out he was turning his filter off at night so the bacteria kept dying back. See, if you understand what is happening and why, it makes it a lot easier.
8: Why so many fish dealers don,t use fishless cycling, and I don,t think its a money thing, after all which dealer wants to kill his livestock.
I've personally explained the technique to several dealers. They are interested but if your business depends on something you are likely to be very reluctant to change. Actually, humans as a species are very reluctant to change. Nevertheless, I've persuaded a couple to try it and no one I know who's tried it has wanted to go back to their old method. Its a matter of trusting something new.
9: Fishless cycling is talked about as if its the newest latest failsafe method but fish hobbyists who have known about fishless cycling for years don,t use it and I,m talking about people who write for aquarium magazines etc who know their stuff.
As I said, people are reluctant to change - it doesn't matter what aspect of human life we're talking about, people are suspicious of new techniques (even if they aren't that new). My experience is that many people I talk to about it don't actually understand the technique, why it works, how it works, and how it can go wrong. I find that when I explain it, their attitude often does a complete 180.
It's the same in medicine: For example, cough medicine has been shown to be practically useless and even harmful in some cases, yet in every hospital in Britain, nurses are still doling it out to every coughing patient; It has been proven that bed-rest is potentially dangerous and should be "prescribed as infrequently as heroin" and yet what does your doctor suggest when you feel unwell? Bedrest. You'd like to think that people (particularly medics) would be guided by the latest research and science, but actually tradition often has a stronger pull.
I hope I've answered your questions. I'm sorry if this post is so long.
