Waiting on reef tank to cycle

[Jeremy Lain]

It is day four, I have a piece of a shrimp in there. Its is soooo boring to look at! I'm seeing a little bit of green algae on rocks, does this mean its starting to cycle?

 

[Idoc]

No, the algae is independant of the bacteria cycle. If you have the lights turned on, you will want to shut them off so you aren't overrun with algae. A cycle takes 30 days typically unless you are using the bacteria in a bottle route. Patience is a virtue...go slow!

 

[Ritual]

I too am waiting for my tank to cycle. It's been there since Sunday with live rock and some of the fluval kickstarter stuff in the bottle. Don't know if the bottled stuff makes any difference but I am going with it. The rock is doing all of the hard work.

I've seen a couple of brittle star fish poking their limbs about, and an unidentified thing too.

Patience... patience...

 

[brandon429]

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

this has impacts to cycles posted here, I see one microconflict already

no conflict in adding bottled bacteria to rocks that already have the bac...only conflict if we are dosing ammonia to live rock.

our thread is about how to assess and measure bacterial presence using only visible animals and where they're located for the type of rock that has those animals.