Cycle question - Day 5 low ammonia, 0 nitrites, 2ppm nitrates - Cycle not started?

[Princess Hockey]

My tank is on day 5, I've been adding Seed bacteria from Aquavitro for 4 days now (bottle says to dose daily for 7 days). Didn't have any test kits until Amazon delivered today. Also have about 80lbs of live rock in there.

Ammonia: 0.1 ppm
Nitrates: 2 ppm
Nitrites: 0
pH: 7.9

Tank is 100g.

Also tested my RODI water jug and came up with the same nitrate reading, about 2 ppm.

My LFS did my initial fill last week with pre mixed saltwater they brought from the store. Since I only have a day of results, I'm not getting a complete picture and I'll take a water sample to my store to make sure they're getting similar results. Do you think my cycle just hasn't started yet?

 

[Katrina71]

Don't bother testing anything for 2 weeks. Go slow.

 

[Pauley]

I wouldn’t sweat it - there’s lots of info here as to the cycle, and how to jumpstart it. Depending on your nutrient load and the state of your live rock, lighting, filtration, etc - it may take more or less time than expected. If you don’t want to get too crazy into it, I’d check out the Red Sea reef maturation literature. It’s a good system for cycling, and they break down what to expect day by day. Good luck!

 

[KJ]

At this point your tank is running, your rocks and sand are in place, your powerheads are positioned, and your filtration has been fine tuned. This is the part that is most important to the well being of your tank. You cannot skip this step or your aquarium will never stop cycling. This can take up to 6 months before you can add any corals. Don’t fret. There is still plenty to do and see! The cycle is a very interesting thing to watch.

Section 5: The Cycle

image via @rusticgirls

In a freshwater aquarium you can add some flake food, wait a couple weeks, and then you can add fish. In the ocean there is much more involved than mechanical filtration. In fact, 70% of your aquariums filtration relies on the maturity of the live rock. A combination of bacteria, algae, and various invertebrates compose the “live” part of the rock. It takes quite a while to establish an ecosystem, even on a microscopic level. Without a proper understanding of the Marine Cycle, you will be in for a long term battle with parameters and algae. There are six main stages to a properly cycled tank. Follow this guide and you cannot mess up. You will need your basic test kit to test the progress.

Stage 1: Ammonia Cycle

Ammonia is the first thing that forms when something rots. It is a waste product in nearly all creatures as well. Instead of using a fish to start the cycle just use some food. Anything that is all natural and uncooked works just fine. Table shrimp that is uncooked works great. Drop it on the sand so it is in view. The shrimp should begin to rot within a couple hours or more. Let this shrimp rot until it is completely gone. If you are curious what your ammonia levels are, go ahead and take some tests. Keep track of the results as the shrimp rots. The smaller the food gets the more ammonia should be present in your water column and pretty soon should be off the charts. This will stay high for a while, but then start to drop. As soon as the ammonia starts to drop you will see a rise in Nitrite, you are now on the next stage.

Stage 2: Nitrite Cycle

Ammonia when broken down by bacteria becomes Nitrite, which is still a toxin. As your Nitrites rise your Ammonia will drop, drop, and keep dropping as long as you haven’t added any animals. Keep up with testing to observe your progress. Eventually your Ammonia will be very low and your nitrites will peak out until it starts feeding a different type of bacteria that turns it into Nitrates. Once your first signs of Nitrates are seen you are on the next stage.

Stage 3: Nitrate Cycle

Nitrates are removed within the live rock deep inside in all of the deep pours. This hidden bacteria consumes the nitrate and creates nitrogen gas as a byproduct. The nitrogen gas rises in the water column and escapes into the air. When one gas leave, another enters. Oxygen is then infused into the water. After the Nitrates start to dissipate your oxygen will increase and you will be ready for the intermission:

 

[Bouncingsoul39]

You need a source of Ammonia to start the cycle. What is your source? Just adding bacteria isn't going to cycle the tank. Some people use straight household liquid ammonia, some people throw a raw whole shrimp in the tank and let is decompose, others use some damsels. Choose one and start the process. No need to start testing until 3 days after your ammonia has been introduced, from there it will take another 2-3 weeks with a bacteria culture product, maybe less.

 

[Princess Hockey]

I think this chart is what was confusing me! I see some ammonia, but low...which means I'm either at the very, very beginning of it, or a little further in. Then with the 0 nitrates I was getting confused...but now as I search I keep seeing "don't bother testing nitrites" so I guess I just need to not worry about it and watch patiently

 

[KrisReef]

Notice the overlap on the three curves, some ammonia is present and nitrates, but no nitrites. Your nitrates likely came with the LFS water.

Starting a tank is kind of like a mammal gestation period, and not like making microwave popcorn.

 

[brandon429]

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/the-microbiology-of-reef-tank-cycling.214618/

 

[brandon429]

PH

It would be neat to see pics of your tank, for the visual ID part. A tenet of the cycling thread above is that anywhere animals are stuck to live rock, like fanworms and sponges and anemones and coralline, by rule of biology all the filtration bacteria are in place. cycling is for adding bac in a place they're not already there. animals on live rock take orders longer to attach and populate where we see them in pics vs time the cycle takes to complete. We can literally look at a tank up close and see if its cycled, without testing.


a cool irony of live rock -skip cycling- is the new system is claimed unable to house animals yet the live rock we bring in is typically already a full biosystem we can -see- involving corals, tiny anemones, amphipods, sponges, fanworms, coralline etc

those inclusions means the live rock is as cycled now as it was three years ago

It's actually fish that are the critically-timed additions, adding them too soon is bad news and it has nothing to do with cycling it's a concern of algae/early tank invasions and disease prevention



Just to add one point of crucial procedure: dry rock systems get ammonia, live rock systems are polar opposite/ you are keeping ammonia -away- so that animals in the rock you paid top dollar for are not killed or stressed. Moving live rocks from a pet store to home doesn't kill bacteria, it kills worms and sponges. Adding more ammonia at home stresses them more, we want them alive and reproducing, they cost more than white dry rock.

 

[Princess Hockey]

PH
It would be neat to see pics of your tank, for the visual ID part. A tenet of the cycling thread above is that anywhere animals are stuck to live rock, like fanworms and sponges and anemones and coralline, by rule of biology all the filtration bacteria are in place. cycling is for adding bac in a place they're not already there. animals on live rock take orders longer to attach and populate where we see them in pics vs time the cycle takes to complete. We can literally look at a tank up close and see if its cycled, without testing.

Pictures I can do! Not the best with this camera but maybe you can see what you need (or not!) The hitchhikers I've spotted are a brittle starfish, several tiny feather duster worms, a chiton (from my other ID thread) and a couple of tiny snails of some sort (tiny little shells, smaller than a pea)

My parameters have remained the same, I've thrown in a little fish food for the past few days, today still came up with 0 ammonia, maybe ~2 nitrates, didn't test for nitrites.

The rock I got was a mixture of sorts. Some of it was very colorful, red and purple..but the bulk of it was very white..came with some white tube structures (like the kind the feather worms appear out of) but other than that..looked "new". Photo doesn't show the strawberry anemone (I believe that's what it is, little ball tips) on the lower part of the tonga rock..photo came out blurry)

 

[brandon429]

Neat!!

Though the rocks aren't colored solid purple, you've def shown coralline on them

and an open fanworm that fanworm is the best visual benthic indicator of cycling above them all, bc that living worm takes longer to plate onto surfaces than it does for bacteria to do so much sooner. that's cycled rock yep and the testing shows it, nitrates are the endpoint of having enough bac

what would really throw us for a loop is if your ammonia tester didn't agree zero (most wont show a true zero) then everyone would be 100% sure its not cycled and we'd be adding ammonia to it though the animals silently scream for us not to heh

the reason there is no anarchy in the general universe of your tank is that the ammonia tester seems to agree. if it didn't, pure revolt heh (and Id still say they are skip cycle rocks)

 

[brandon429]

pseudocorynactis is the ball anemone, nice spotting there. though the rock hasn't been in a high coralline supporting environ, Id vote it fully cycled. all you do now is buy some zoanthids, and candy corals, the bullet proof starters, and go to town ha

 

[Princess Hockey]

Neat!!

Though the rocks aren't colored solid purple, you've def shown coralline on them

and an open fanworm that fanworm is the best visual benthic indicator of cycling above them all, bc that living worm takes longer to plate onto surfaces than it does for bacteria to do so much sooner. that's cycled rock yep and the testing shows it, nitrates are the endpoint of having enough bac

what would really throw us for a loop is if your ammonia tester didn't agree zero (most wont show a true zero) then everyone would be 100% sure its not cycled and we'd be adding ammonia to it though the animals silently scream for us not to heh

the reason there is no anarchy in the general universe of your tank is that the ammonia tester seems to agree. if it didn't, pure revolt heh (and Id still say they are skip cycle rocks)

Awesome, thank you! I can count about 5 fanworms on that one rock that all opened up again late on Friday, I did some rock shuffling on Tuesday which made the water cloudy and they all disappeared and the anemone dude closed up too, but they've all been open since then.

 

[Princess Hockey]

pseudocorynactis is the ball anemone, nice spotting there. though the rock hasn't been in a high coralline supporting environ, Id vote it fully cycled. all you do now is buy some zoanthids, and candy corals, the bullet proof starters, and go to town ha

The fun part! My last tank, I started with a clean up crew...but I had algae. I'll go dig around the forum to find out some ideas for where to start. Thank you for all of your help

 

[brandon429]

I want to toss this in

algae is never a function of what you have in the tank that corrects it, eats it, or water params that suppress it.

Algae being there/not there is solely a function of whether we allow it to grow. You always have the option to lift out the rock its on, set it in the sink and use a kitchen knife to literally debride it off the rocks like a dentist does roughly to our teeth. the knife makes the algae go away, then there's no algae. On the former algae spot, fixed outside of the tank so we aren't messing with params corals enjoy just fine, place a few drops of peroxide on the cleaned area to bake off algae leftovers. after a couple mins, rinse it clean and put the whole rock back.

its not that param controls/clean up crews don't work, its that they might work and that's the worst risk for a tank I can think of.

Only large/inaccessible tanks so huge they cant be manually cleaned have to take the risk of algae invasions, the rest are easily kept algae free day 1 to day 3000 with work that ranges home to home, tank to tank, variable to variable.

for sure things like light intensity, how soon you stock fish (a big deal in early algae problems is fish too soon before hand guiding the algae out a while) and other factors determine how soon and strong algae comes on, but that has nothing to do with it actually being in the tank, that's something we allow or disallow. That's a neat way to frame algae challenges in an aquarium vs not knowing how things are about to go down each time we set one up.

make your rock stacks accessible so there's no excuse to grow algae without simply killing it off, you'll never be invaded its not possible.

CUC and water params are only for preventing algae never to remove it

so, if you see algae pop up and these items are already in place, we still have the fell swoop.

every invaded/lost tank on the internet didn't apply the fell swoop, they crossed fingers and hoped, it didn't come.


some make it occur, but only 1%. the rest are happy to take what comes along in the tank as long as they never have to work to do anything about it manually. They'll apply that theory permanently, and then after 8 yrs and 10 grand in corals they'll post in one of our algae invasion threads on how to catch up after allowing it to grow all these years.

Thought Id post the cure to you, long before you get the algae. Notice how our method doesn't allow for excuses or invasions, that's a key detail

algae invasion is a psychology, its not a biology

hope that's not confusing but you can see where Im coming from...if you are determined not to have algae, you wont, even if you never use a CUC

*as you guide/work this algae out, the coralline takes over and the rocks reject their own algae. as long as it has barren spots, algae is coming soon and it doesn't mean a thing about your params or CUC, algae belongs on a reef that's why it comes. we are either going to predict it right now and farm it on purpose and have an uglies phase that lasts X weeks/months, or we wont. Its that simple of a choice
B