Forum Challenge: link an example of a failed reef tank cycle from any post on the internet.

[brandon429]

Team, doesnt even have to be your own tank can be google searches. A tank we've actually owned with pics though is better, some details we can identify in what constitutes a stalled cycle



this is a continuing study in the ever-changing rules for cycling reef tanks and for this post, we want to see the bad outcomes among all the various cycles uploaded to the web.


lets start by rounding up pics or links of a stalled cycle, let the api's rain down

*The heart of this thread is not to report api stalled at .25 in a tank of fish swimming and eating fine (all examples of a stalled cycle are this test-only fear)


in this thread, we want to see the dead fish. Can anyone simply link an example of a failed reef tank cycle? surely there are some from 2006 that was a rough year in cycling as I recall~

In order to make a big picture view about reef tank cycling, we have to see the downside, the obviously failed cycle of gray water and floating dead fish and smelly water (hallmarks of true ammonia poisoning).

as you search, ask yourself if today's cycle training carries a heavy implied consequence for noncompliance. arent there six or seven actions listed that will cause a stall? well there's a million cycled reefs reported on google now, lets see the consequential ones.

if you can find one in the last ten years I'm impressed

if you can find one sole example in the last two years I'm amazed, we should have a lot more consequences on file for something claimed to us this finicky, I'm thinking.

 

[KrisReef]

Challenge excepted

Don’t read past the first post.

I cannot standby with an unanswered thread today.

 

[brandon429]

Kris thank you for our first post, keep em coming team

 

[brandon429]

new modified request for the thread, post pics of dead fish ideally from threads Im not blathering away in.


we will need to dig to page 5988 search returns to find such posts off google lol

The goal was to get more search returns than the ones that try and resell us bottle bac for systems already full on bac

show me the fails!

 

[brandon429]

It was recently pointed out that initial fish losses can be from ammonia but disease can be the claimed killer, post any examples of lost fish early on we want that data. Some posts get follow up details we can use in cause tracing, post em

early fish deaths, causative tbd / link some team.


it is incredibly hard to meet this challenge

how accurate is our current cycle knowledge in the hobby, I must ask.


When I started searching for the forum snipe that is a failed cycle, I truly expected to see at least ten examples.

seeking just one here if we can, one single example even from fifteen years ago will do fine.

am I to infer that literally any haphazard arrangement of things we throw together in a reef tank is 100% guaranteed to cycle at least by when folks are adding animals? If there's another way to interpret missing data, link that way.

why don't cycling articles and advices indicate this certainty/question for all of 2021.

-later in the thread we can review whether or not fish are surviving but being harmed. for starters, we need to see the endpoint though, the known bad outcome. If there are many, we can assume lots of fish were pre-burnt leading up to the demise.

and if there aren't any examples



and everyone's fish + bottle bac + dry rock and sand ate normally, swam normally, you tell me if they were being burned.

 

[brandon429]

Ill go link this on youtube comments for cycling videos. someone with a facebook post a link there if you would pls so we can get lots of input and details

ok post fish death within the first three months, we need something to attribute to raw ammonia here team

 

[brandon429]

Team, I think we've uncovered the single largest lie/fallacy involved in public reefing. any examples?

all my youtube cycling comments posted on...nada

all the quirks and adjustments we must do to finesse a cycle into place

lowering salinity vs high

temps

alk

phosphate, or your cycle will stall


having ammonia above 5 ppm extended


having high nitrite


not any of that has led to one single actual failed cycle? Hmm

what if the takeaway is this: water bac have been doing fine in water for millennia and we aren't the determinants of their job. our purchases, embellishments etc


that means bottle bac sellers can only get to us one time (at the start of a dry rock cycle) but not four times or more to remedy a condition that does not exist in reefing (the stalled, or incomplete cycle)

 

[srobertb]

So I’m missing something maybe but if this helps, it helps. This was 3-4 years ago.

I had setup 4-5 tanks in my life. Same process. I always used Gulf Live Rock. It came in, I put it in the tank, within a week I had an ammonia spike then nitrates and no ammonia or nitrites. The cycle was complete.

I’m convinced they sent me a Eunice worm. The tank got broken down because of this and we moved shortly thereafter.

On my next tank I tried a different company for my live rock. I will not say which one. Same process. Setup, water, new live rock, away I went.

HUGE ammonia spike. Stayed the course. Ammonia off the charts. Horrible smell. 3 weeks: 50% Water change. Ammonia still high. 5 weeks: 100% Water change. By this point I was just dealing with dead rock and then began a new standard cycle as if I had gotten dry rock. Controlled the ammonia through dosing and the cycle took a few weeks but came around as standard.

There is a point where the tank becomes so toxic nothing can happen and the cycle stalls for a period of time I believe the average home owner would call “infinite”. Would it have eventually sorted itself out l? I don’t know. No human being could sensibly leave anything with that smell just sitting in their home. I’m embarrassed I let it sit for as long as I did.

 

[brandon429]

srobertb​

Hey I agree that kind of smell indicates ammonia, considering the sourcing suspect too / uncured rocks are expected to leak it.

Thank you very much for posting. I wasnt very clear in my titling regarding types of cycles we want to collect, that is a fine starter. Also looking for failed bottle bac cycles on dry rocks too, those too are very concerning for folks as to whether or not the fish are being burned. I agree they'd be burned in the scenario where curing rocks smell bad, agreed. we are looking for examples where fish died or certainly would die, and among curing ocean rocks roughly shipped or handled I agree they would be in peril and smell confirms it.

 

[Timfish]

Gotta scratch my head on this one, in over 3 decades of reef keeping and 2 1/2 decades aquarium maintenance business I can't say I've ever seen a failed cycle. Might have had a hand full seem to go south but water changes and manual removal of gunk and nuisance algae always brought it around.

 

[brandon429]

Tim I think you bring lots of reefing experience to us and reef central glad to have the input

anytime I’m lurking on reefcentral reading to see what they’re advancing it’s your posts that bring new info and best practices to them. You deserve an office and a corporate liaison MasterCard funded by Rev as the ambassador between reef2reef and reefcentral.


I continue to be shocked on a daily basis that all these preps and adjustments we make so cycles will complete don’t matter, they are going to complete anyway.

 

[Timfish]

Thank you Brandon! (I won't tell anyone you said anything nice about me )

Back in the late 90s a brief conversation with the director of infectious diseases at one of the local hospitals got me to thinking holisticely and putting the ecosystem first. Paraphrased, she commented "good" bacteria thriving in the wrong place was bad, what was important was having the right bacteria in the right place. Now a couple decades later with systems, fish and corals decades old and TONS of research showing how complex microbial processes are across the board, not just reef systems, I am so glad she took the time to talk with me and I'm just trying to pass it forward.

 

[Just John]

Here's a picture of dead fish for you Brandon. Not exactly what you were looking for, but it is what I would call a type of tank failure on a massive scale. This is from a public aquarium in India where up to 10% of the fish died every month due to "environmental factors". That was considered acceptable, because “It is not possible to replicate the exact sea conditions inside a tank for these fish". This is where they threw the dead ones each day.

 

[2Wheelsonly]

Here's a picture of dead fish for you Brandon. Not exactly what you were looking for, but it is what I would call a type of tank failure on a massive scale. This is from a public aquarium in India where up to 10% of the fish died every month due to "environmental factors". That was considered acceptable, because “It is not possible to replicate the exact sea conditions inside a tank for these fish". This is where they threw the dead ones each day.

This is worse than their tech support and that's saying alot!

 

[brandon429]

Team what we are aiming to show is that any time we attempt to start a cycle, it completes and we don’t have to do much song and dance to facilitate it

was that a cycling reef they’d made above, all those fish went into a new tank? What bottle bac did they use

an ideal example to link is someone who starts a new tank with a fish-in cycle using bottled bacteria and then they didn’t make it

 

[Paul B]

I don't remember if my tank cycle failed or my tank crashed because it was to long ago. But I think my tank cycled right away because at that time there was no ASW so I used real sea water and rocks from the sea along with a lot of stuff I probably should not have put in my tank.

There were also no test kits so I couldn't tell where the cycle was anyway.
But I am sure plenty of modern tanks would fail due to the lack of real microfauna from the sea and I can't see any way around it unless you get real live rock.

 

[brandon429]

They never fail as a cycle, bc the bottle bac carries the initial load just fine


but they fail in preventing dinos wipeouts and mass fish disease sets in, fast we see in the disease forum

 

[Just John]

Team what we are aiming to show is that any time we attempt to start a cycle, it completes and we don’t have to do much song and dance to facilitate it

was that a cycling reef they’d made above, all those fish went into a new tank? What bottle bac did they use

an ideal example to link is someone who starts a new tank with a fish-in cycle using bottled bacteria and then they didn’t make it

I'm not sure what the exact issue was, I just added it because I thought it was interesting and related. They never would say exactly what the cause was, but I think it was the local government that made them start fresh and they overloaded the system again, but eventually started to sort things out when enough fish died off and the filtration could handle what was left. The aquarium told everyone that that was a normal way to do it. (at least I found it because I was looking for what you had asked for )

 

[brandon429]

Team, I'm still searching here can someone let me know if you find anything specifically what we are looking for


asking for another forum. They don't believe me its this hard to find an example of the #1 stated risk in reef tank cycling. On more than one forum online Ive asked to see one example, none of them had any.

its a neat form of data mining: what skeptics will admit after searching comes up in pattern as good data.

Is there a clear/cogent example among one million logged reef tank cycles done in forums last 20 years of a failed fish-in cycle? One example, among a million, searching for it.

and if one is found, we'll ask to see the second one naturally to establish a pattern vs a lark.

since the dawn of typed reefing, how common are reef tank cycle fails?

 

[brandon429]

anticipating the crowd's concern I bet its this: but all these fish-in cycles have varied control of ammonia, these fish were burned but not to lethality level. all the fish lived we can search out but that doesn't mean they weren't burned.


I think it does mean they weren't burned. if you are setting up thousands of reef tanks on a continuum of happy vs harmed, we absolutely must have more than one example of the ultimately harmed in order to have a continuum-- vs just a simple straight line of all bottle bac cycles ever attempted in a display worked fine.

since we're having trouble finding clearly dead start cycles, we can sub in any post about immediate fish behavior that could be tied to ammonia challenge, post what you can find.


I claim the fish losses come after month 2 and before month 8 in typical new dry start reefs. disease is the killer, not the cycle, per all online logged history. I can think of about five seneye links now where fish in cycles + Dr Tims tracked out perfectly safe, there's no reason to believe the ones from the past on red sea or api failed, those were just common misreads that have harmed the hobby tremendously.

I can't give out any more TAN conversion excuses either on false stuck cycle threads, apparently red sea needs to lead with this in bold letters:

*Do not mislead your forum peers by reporting total ammonia in a reef tank, they only want to hear about nh3, take your about to be stated level down x10*<---------all failed cycle reports are this.