I came up empty in my search, however. There was an abundance of information about seeding a tank, why it was a good idea, and how to do it, but no data collected in the process after it is done, and how long it can take.
What prompted this post was some disappointing advice I found being given over and over on general advice sites like Ask.com, and it is something I have run into frequently on the fish forums I frequent. People new to the hobby who are setting up a brand new tank have enough information to know that the tank has to be cycled, and they know the probably should not do it with fish, and it is at this point they are told to "seed" their new tank. Friends who have aquariums offer to help, and the new person will announce that their buddy is giving them a sack of gravel from their tank and they will pop that sack into their new tank, wait a couple of weeks for the bacterial colonies to grow, and then add their new fish. Another advice site had a person giving out lots of recommendations, since she said she had quite a few aquariums, and she said that you needed to set up your tank and let it run for a couple of weeks without fish to allow the "bacterial colonies" to establish before putting the fish in. She assured the reader that if they had any questions at all about their aquariums she'd be more than happy to help. Bless her heart.
I don't pretend to know everything about the freshwater aquarium hobby. Far from it. The more I learn the less I seem to know. I have killed a lot of fish from pure impatience or ignoring what I know to be true, thinking that maybe this time I can fudge the natural progression of a tank settling into stability. The good thing for me is that there was no internet when I was new to the hobby so I could not embarrass myself too badly on the worldwide web with my ignorance, because I'm arrogant enough to spout off at the mouth without really knowing what I'm talking about. Now I do it on my blog, where I'm allowed to spout whatever the heck I want! LOL!
However, I do know a few things, and one of the few simple truths about an aquarium is the nitrogen cycle. Ammonia produced by fish and inverts or decaying food will foster the colonization of bacteria that consumes this ammonia, which is extremely harmful to fish. The waste product of those bacteria is nitrite (NO2), and another species of bacteria colonizes to consume that nitrite, which is also harmful to fish. The waste product of those bacteria is nitrate (NO3), which is harmful to fish but less so at low levels, and it is the NO3 that we control with water changes.
So we've got two sets of bacterial colonies that we must wait on to get their act together and make the tank inhabitable for fish. Every established tank you see, with fish swimming happily about in good health and eating well is loaded up with bacteria that render the fishes' waste harmless to them. It can take quite a while for this process to finalize itself - in experiments I've done it has taken as long as six weeks for a fishless cycle to complete. There are other factors, such as temperature and pH that affect the cycle, and different bacteria colonize in brackish and saline environments. It can be frustrating to wait, looking at this glass box of water that has no fish and no apparent purpose. If you don't have a source of seed material then a fishless cycle is the way to go, and that's what I'd do if I found myself with no other tanks and no friends with tanks. Just settle in and wait, and it will eventually happen, dosing the tank daily with pure ammonia. Ammonia is food for the bacteria and is mandatory for the cycle to happen.
What people with more than one tank have done for years is to "seed" the new tank with bacteria from the old tank. The bacteria in the filter of an established tank is a precious commodity, and we take care to protect it. We clean out our filters carefully, avoiding sterilizing techniques and being sure not to use chlorine-laden tap water to rinse out our sponges and pads.
I'm very glad to see lots of advice being given on the web about seeding a new aquarium to avoid New Tank Syndrome. This is great, and I'm glad this bit of news is getting out to newbies right off the bat, since it used to be you had to learn the hard way.
When I started keeping fish in the very early 80's as far as I knew there was no such thing as a "cycle," and ammonia removing chips were my friend. I was constantly battling ammonia spikes, cloudy water, and fish gasping at the surface. The advice I was given at the pet store was the following:
- You have to remove the ammonia with Ammo Chips in your filter. There's no other way to remove it, and if you don't your fish will die (this part, at least, was true).
- Don't do too many water changes - just top off the water when it evaporates for best results. Changing water screws up the natural balance the tank has achieved.
- If your water is even slightly hard out of the tap you can't use it for your aquarium - it will kill your fish.
So, times have changed and the information has slowly tricked out there, so even though I'm still hearing pet store employees advising people to use pH adjuster to get their tap water to 7 (that is for another post, please don't get me started on that now....), for the most part new people to the hobby are starting out with more knowledge than I did.
What's wrong with the information provided about seeding a new tank? Well, the very important fact that the bacteria needs to be fed to stay alive. It will die (I wish I had a reference for you) within hours without a source of ammonia. When you get that sack of gravel from your buddy be sure the gravel was collected from only the surface, because lower than a few centimeters you've got anaerobic bacteria (reference goes here) and the bacteria we need for cycling a tank is aerobic bacteria (reference goes here). Once you get that gravel it will be better utilized, since the bacteria is aerobic, to place it in a filter, or at least hang the bag in front of the aquarium outflow, so water flows over it. Lying in a lump at the bottom of the aquarium, in a corner where there may be very little water flow depending on the filtration and flow you have in your tank. it will likely do you no good, the bacteria dying without access to the ammonia in the water column.
This is why the advice to set up your tank and run it for a couple of weeks to let the biological bacteria accumulate is nonsense, because in the absence of ammonia, which I presume is the case in a newly set up aquarium, no bacteria will grow. Bacteria needs to be fed, and if you don't have your fish at the ready that seed material is going to go to waste. High or low temps will kill it as well, so be careful when you transport it from one tank to the other.
Think of it like a heart transplant - have the needy patient (your new tank of fish) ready and willing to accept the gift of the new heart (bacteria) and while no ambulance or police escort is required, put the dirty filter material or gravel seed material in a cooler or other container that will maintain the tank temperature and conditions until you can get it into the new tank, where it can go right to work oxidizing ammonia. If you've got your own established tank then you can just walk it over to the new tank and get it in place quickly for the best results. You can start your new tank filter on an established tank for at least two to four weeks to get it seeded, and be sure the filter material has brown goop on it - that's the good stuff! I tend to run at least two filters on most of my tanks so I can mix and match, swap and reap the benefits of bacterial colonies at the ready.
I know that as long as there is the World Wide Web there will be all kinds of information supplied, and it is up to us to do our own research and determine whether the source can be trusted. I'm sitting here polluting the Web with my own opinions and experiences and some may disagree with me (please comment if you do - I'm a big girl and can handle it, and it would let me know that someone out there is reading all this crap I write), but I have achieved some degree of success by doing a few things:
- Protect your bacteria - it can be delicate. Feed it and provide the proper environment for it to thrive and don't disturb the tank much at all for a few months after the cycle is complete. A well intentioned gravel vac on a brand new setup can cause a mini-cycle. Even your betta bowl is cycled, so when you dump it out every week (yes, every week, the betta will thank you for it) don't scrub the sides or the substrate too much. Your bacteria is there doing God's work for you.
- Change your water. Every week. Even if it is only 10% do it regularly. Once I began doing water changes like clockwork my tanks became very stable, without illness or water quality problems of any kind. This might be the best thing anyone can do to maintain a healthy tank.
- Overfilter
- Change your water.
- Be patient in all things Aquarium.
- Stock carefully and pay attention to your fish and their behavior with each other. Remove anybody causing problems. When you remove this troublemaker now you can set up another tank! Yay!
- Change your water. Every week.
- Plants almost always help keep a tank stable, if you have fish that won't eat them. There are several species of plant that don't require substrate and are hard to kill for all you people out there who think they have Black Thumbs. I'll bet you can do it. Try, anyway. A little bit of fluorescent or natural light and some fish to provide nutrients and you're probably going to have success with plants like Java fern, Java moss, Anubias sp., water sprite and even duckweed. Crypts are pretty easy too, with low lighting requirements for the most part, though they are heavy root feeders and need a good layer of gravel or sand.
- The final recommendation, if you do NOTHING else, change your water.
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