Stocking After Fishless Cycle

[Gary D]

Sorry to hijack this thread but just for information, how long is it before the bacteria start to die off if no more ammonia is added?

Thanks,
Gary.

 

[craigieboy01]

Sorry to hijack this thread

but just for information, how long is it before the bacteria start to die off if no more ammonia is added?

Thanks,
Gary.

Gary I'm not sure but someone like Waterdrop will probs give you some info on that.

 

[Assaye]

Sorry to hijack this thread

but just for information, how long is it before the bacteria start to die off if no more ammonia is added?

Thanks,
Gary.

Gary I'm not sure but someone like Waterdrop will probs give you some info on that.

I believe they start to die in significant numbers after about 12 hours.

 

[waterdrop]

Agree, I believe its another of those log type curves where you have time on the horizontal axis and number of bacterial cells on the vertical axis...

Your line starts up high with all the millions of cells you have and moves to the right almost horizontally because you are losing very, very few cells, then it gradually begins to curve more downwards and eventually its going in a steep drop.

I think as long as a filter is processing fresh oxygenated water through and past the bacteria you've really got a couple days, as the trace ammonia that looks like zero ppm to our ammonia test kits will be gradually going downward all that time but still providing some material. A very different situation is if power is out and the bacteria are sitting is still water, then we start to worry sooner than 12 hours and we'll want to manually change water in the dead filter on some repeating basis, including right away in the morning if its gone overnight. The worst of all of course is if the bacteria are allowed to dry out - this kills off most of them (depending on how dry the core of the media acually gets) very quickly.

~~waterdrop~~