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Warning - before you go on, this is a BIG post. If you haven't the time to sit and stare at it, print it off.

I was leafing through back numbers of Today's Fishkeeper while watching the Panda Breeding Aquarium coming on stream, and alighted upon an article in the Marine Letters section that was rather apposite, despite my aquarium being freshwater. The letter in question was headed "Can I Cycle My Tank Faster?"

Oh, dear.

As the magazine's resident expert said in his answer, the unfortunate answer is NO. If some person ever came up with a workable rapid cycling technique that genuinely produced a stable aquarium capable of maintaining marine life, that person would, as the magazine's expert succinclty stated, become a millionaire overnight.

There is, and this is something I keep pressing time and time again in several of my posts here on the Board, no substitute for patience. Why am I waiting 7 days before even bothering to test my new Panda Breeding Aquarium for safe chemical parameters? Because in the first 7 days of operation, those parameters will be fluctuating wildly. Only after the first 7 days of running, will that aquarium be even remotely worth putting a fish in, and most sensible people will choose, having opted to initiate the biofilter substrate using the fishless method in the beginning, to continue the cycling process with one of the so-called 'bomb proof' species such as White Clouds or Black Widow Tetras. In my case, I'm deliberately preparing this aquarium as a nursery for baby Pandas, which are fussy, delicate little fish that will keel over at the first whiff of an ammonia level approaching 0.01 parts per million. With this aim in mind, I want to make sure that this aquarium is stable enough to be a nurturing environment for my delicate little babies. Which means that once the readings are in the 'safe zone', the first occupants will probably be the Lemon Tetras from the community aquarium, as they'll be able to withstand any further smaller fluctuations far better than even adult Pandas, let alone fry. Once the Lemons have passed the new aquarium fit to live in, then it'll be time to introduce the Pandas to their brand new honeymoon hotel. Which means I'm looking at sometime at the end of February before I start letting the Pandas spawn in it.

Now given that both my sets of existing Pandas are spawning like mad, seemingly in anticipation of being the first to try out this new home (how the hell do they know I'm doing this? Telepathy?) I'd love nothing better than to drop them in now and let them frolic away. Which would be a recipe for disaster. The poor Pandas would almost certainly keel over and die. Dead Pandas do not for a happy Calilasseia make. Hence it's time to exercise patience and let the system turn over slowly.

The marine expert in the magazine made a statement that will probably alarm anyone whose idea of patience consists of channel zapping while waiting for the blockbuster on Sky Digital, but which I shall happily explain. He stated that he didn't consider a marine aquarium fully stabilised until it had been running for a minimum of 18 months. That's right, 18 months. If that sounds as if he is erring very heavily on the side of caution, take note of the following.

One of the reasons why freshwater fishes have proven so adaptable to the aquarium, even fairly delicate ones such as my Panda Corys, and for that matter, Discus (which despite their sensitivity are successfully kept and bred the world over), is this. Freshwater fishes have adapted to live in environments that are subject to seasonal, and sometimes more momentarily transient, changes. The sudden addition of large volumes of new water to the Amazon, for example, during the rainy season, which can amount to several tens of millions of gallons per day, has two principal effects: washing detritus from the surrounding land (soil, leaf litter etc) into the rivers, with a consequent increase in the levels of dissolved organics such as humic acids, and dilution of said newly input dissolved organics by direct rainfall upon the river waters themselves. Although these changes are, compared to those likely to appear in an aquarium, pretty small, changes they are, and freshwater fishes have adapted to live with those changes. They have, over millions of years, evolved the osmoregulatory machinery to deal with water chemistry changes, even the delicate Discus. Some are definitely more adaptable than others in this regard - Black Widow Tetras will survive water chemistry changes that will kill Discus in no time - but adaptable they all are, to varying degrees. Even though the water volumes in the Amazon are huge, resulting in changes being small enough to warrant fairly sophisticated measuring techniques to detect, changes are present even in that immense body of water. Which means that fluctuations in a freshwater aquarium, provided that these are not extreme or involve dangerous substances such as ammonia, are likely to be tolerable by the inmates.

The coral reef, on the other hand, is subject to nothing like those kind of changes. As big as the Amazon is (and this is a river big enough for the US navy to sail nuclear aircraft carriers on!), its water volume is tiny compared with the oceans. Any added matter from, say, rivers flowing into the sea, is going to make a negligible change in a coral reef's water chemistry. While there may be measureable local changes near the river delta, out on the atolls that change has been swamped almost completely out of existence by untold trillions of gallons of seawater. Hence the old cliché about a drop in the ocean. To measure any changes in water chemistry around a coral reef such as Australia's Great Barrier Reef, you would need a massively expensive and sophisticated laboratory, with mass spectrometers and all manner of other high-tech toys. And, the coral reefs have enjoyed this stability for something like 50 million years. Faced with such stability, marine coral reef fishes have not needed to evolve sophisticated mechanisms to cope with change, mechanisms whose operation would waste needless energy in such an environment, energy that would be, from the standpoint of those fishes, better utilised in growth and reproduction, for example. The result is that a coral reef fish will keel over and die if subject to water chemistry fluctuations that a freshwater fish wouldn't even notice. It's a testimony to how far the hobby has come that we can not only keep these fishes alive in a marine aquarium at all, but do so for long lifespans. As recently as the late 1970s, marine aquaria were, in the main, graveyards for fishes, until the essential principles of the nitrogen cycle started to make themselves felt. Now, of course, we have calcium reactors, phosphate management, trace element management and a plethora of other techniques to enhance the longevity of marine fishes.

But, that essential inability to withstand fluctuations remains. Some marine fishes (Damsels, Lionfishes, for example), are better able to cope than others (Butterfly Fishes are top of every marine aquarist's list of the delicate and the best-left-to-the-expert species). Some of these are, in the light of the above, amazingly forgiving of a marine aquarist's mistakes. Be duly thankful to these hardy fishes for existing and making the hobby possible in the first place! But, even these will keel over and die if water chemistry parameters fly all over the graph.

Which is why our expert in the magazine made his statement. Even the most humble of marine aquaria, put together by a beginning hobbyist with the tiniest of ambitions for his first marine aquarium (e.g., keep a pair of percula clowns and an anemone alive), is a complex system with thousands of operating parameters, interwoven in complex negative and positive feedback loops whose intricacy is only now becoming apparent to research scientists. The idea that even said research scientists, with the advantages of big budgets, top-flight equipment and vast knowledge bases, can twiddle all of those parameter knobs simultaneously and keep things going, is a complete non starter. Which means you are even less capable of doing so.

The beauty of the aquarium is that if it is sensitively handled, it can become largely self-correcting. It can become a stable system. Or, more correctly, the fluctuations that occur within it can be constrained (principally by the action of those nice little micro-organisms we all strive to cultivate in hordes in living rock, for example) within limits acceptable to our fishes. But getting to that state takes time. Even once the critical nitrogen cycle management is in place (ammonia to nitrite to nitrate), we still have to deal with the nitrates by some means (water changes, algal refugia to absorb the nitrates), there are phosphates to deal with, we have to supplement trace elements extracted from the water by the fishes and invertebrates, our corals need calcium input, and then there's the matter of light cycle management for the zooxanthellae in the case of live corals. Juggling all of these factors takes skill, skill learnt the hard way through the patient acquisition of experience. As I once wrote in another article, an aquarium is not a TV- take out of the box, switch on, start channel zapping. It's a complex biological system that needs you to actively manage it, tend to it, be prepared to make major interventions in times of crisis, and know when to intervene and know when to leave alone. You can't yet acquire a 'Plug And Play' module for your brain to give you that expertise in a trice!

Reaching the stage when all of these parameters are residing within acceptable limits to coral reef fishes, so that the aquarium becomes a decent life support system for them, allowing them to live for extended lifespans, sadly doesn't happen overnight. Which is why our magazine expert made that claim - that a marine aquarium only reaches that happy state after a minimum of 18 months' operation. Some may be fortunate, and achieve that happy state in less time, but the expert's point is that given the capacity for such systems to flucutate suddenly for reasons that we only incompletely understand (and in part because the modelling of such systems mathematically is governed by partial differential equations subject to the laws of chaotic dynamics - a technical area that I have some knowledge of but won't inflict upon you all in heavy doses because believe me, it's a seriously brain taxing subject), 18 months is a 'safe bet' as a minimum time span required to reach the point where the probability of catastrophic breakdown is safely minimised. You can now breathe after reading that one out loud.

Oh, and because of the fact that it takes time for such things as bacteria populations to grow, here's a tip for those engaging in fishless cycling. Dropping one load of organic matter to decay in the aquarium and then leaving it, is probably going to be less successful than you'd like. Think about it. You have a small population of your desired bacteria starting off, and you want that population to grow. In a mature aquarium, that population is being constantly fed. You're feeding the fishes regularly, they're feeding the bacteria. Well, you have to feed the bacteria in the absence of your fishes. And, feed a growing population. So, what am I doing? I'm feeding the Panda Breeding Aquarium with a tiny pinch of fish food on a regular basis, as if it had fish living in it. I'm feeding the bacteria constantly, with measured doses of food. Dumping half a can of food in and letting it rot has much the same effect on your aquarium, as would be had in your home if someone came along and dumped a couple of dead buffalo in the living room. Your home would soon cease to be a place you'd want to live in. On the other hand, someone popping four rashers of bacon in your fridge every evening for you to eat is a different matter. You'd accept the four rashers of bacon and enjoy some nice bacon sandwiches before bedtime. It's the same with the bacteria. What they want is regular bacon in bite size morsels, not hulking great dead buffalo corpses. Enough food to keep the existing bacteria happy, plus a little extra to feed the population explosion you're hoping for. As a result, I reckon I'll actually cycle my Panda aquarium and get it up and running faster, by exercising patience and judgement this early in the game, than I would if I acted like a channel zapper.

As a matter of fact, someone E-Mailed me recently to ask what was going wrong with a friend's aquarium. You're going to love this. Guess what they dropped into an uncycled aquarium? Forty new fish in one go, including half a dozen Pangasius cats that would, in the fullness of time, grow to a size where they wouldn't physically fit in the aquarium, let alone have room to swim. The classic "TV culture instant gratification" mentality at work, with predictable and spectacularly disastrous results. I told my correspondent to send his friend round to my home to be educated with a big stick.



Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Obviously live rock and live sand is unknown to this long thread poster...

Is there a question somewhere in that triple trilogy of brainteasers or is it merely an exercise in computer typing??

--garyroland.

gary Thats was a great article very informative i printed it off. thanks

--fish1

Cal does a nice job writing articles for members who like to read what he thinks. I think it would be even better if he submitted these as official articles that can be pulled at a later date or maybe a collection (i.e., Cal's Journal of Panda Breeding)

Gary, the best way to deal with any long post you don't care to read, is to pass it up gracefully, without comment.

Nice read Cal! Never thought about fluctuations in freshwater versus SW, but it makes sense.

Last edited by Cory_Di at 15-Jan-2005 22:34

Last edited by Cory_Di at 15-Jan-2005 22:35

A wonderful read Calilasseia. I do enjoy your posts. Although I already had some knowledge about a marine aquarium taking a goodly amount of time before becoming "stable" (even with live rock and live sand), I never really thought about the big 'why' picture (oceans vs. lakes and rivers). Thankyou.

Obviously live rock and live sand is unknown to this long thread poster...

You obviously missed this sentence ...

Or, more correctly, the fluctuations that occur within it can be constrained (principally by the action of those nice little micro-organisms we all strive to cultivate in hordes in living rock, for example)

Paragraph 11, line 2.

The point being made by said magazine expert, and with which I was concurring, is that even a system with a well-balanced collection of live rock and live sand will take time to settle to the point where the probability of wild fluctuations decreases to a 'safe' level. Let's face it, there are aspects of marine microbiology, and the biology of the occupants of living rock and live sand, that even the experts are still researching. Who knows, in 20 years time, we'll be reading articles in magazines on cultivating micro-organisms in living rock that aid in phosphate management, for example, that allow us to do away with RowaPhos and other such ion exchange resins. The hobby is living not only from the standpoint of the participation of the hobbyists, but from the standpoint of the science being living too - i.e., research continues and will continue for some time to come.

Plus, as I mentioned above, the mathematical modelling of such complex biological systems (something I have at least a passing familiarity with) is covered by a plethora of partial differential equations in multiple variables. Which, when analysed by pure mathematicians, exhibit the characteristics of those differential equations now known to be 'chaotic' in the formal sense of chaotic dynamics, i.e., a small change in initial conditions results in a very large change in the evolution of the solutions. The so called 'Butterfly Effect'. Anyone who claims to be able to stabilise a system of that nature quickly is making a very ambitious claim to put it mildly




Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Great article, that's all I have to say. Thanks

Yes, you can speed up the cycling of any tank and you can do it a number of ways.

Method one: mulm... ahh that tasty stuff.......the detrital material that settles out after vacuuming your tank's gravel, what does it have? Bacteria and organic matter.

What does the new tank's gravel and filter have that an old established tank's filter and gravel does not?

Mulm.

So add that fresh to any new tank you start up.
I did this for the last 30 years after working at a LFS. I thought everyone did this.

Why wait 18 months, 3 weeks whatever?

Add what's missing, live healthy thriving bacteria with a good fresh food source to help continue to cyle the waste and nutrients in the new tank without missing a beat.

I'm always amazed at the lengths people will go to cycle a tank with ammonia and fishless cycling and other methods with bottles of bacterial cyst etc.

Simple cut to the chase methods like adding mulm are much more effective faster and add precisely what is missing from an established tank.

This is true for Marine, Brackish or FW.
I typically will add a light dusting or OM(organic matter) such as something semi labile, something that will not break down too quick like ground peat, this will reduce the sediment a little but not long, by that time the bacteria have had a chance to recolonize the gravel bed.

Then the bacteria run the show from thenm on.

Simple, free, faster than anyone else's method.


The other method: plants/macro algae.
They short circuit the N cycle by removing the NH4 directly and reducing the NH4=>NO2=> NO3 bacteria which use up O2, and then they add pure O2(100%) on top of that, not just aeration.

Both SW and FW can benefit from this. And the plants will also remove the NO3 much faster than denitriyers will also, so you can go for months and years in well balanced tanks without a water change since the plantsd/macro remove the waste.

If you have plant eating fish, place the plants outside the tank, in the filter or a place where the other fish cannot get them. These can be emergent or submersed plants and any tank can benefit from this.

The other way: do some large frequent water changes.
This is the best option for many tanks that are smaller (for SW also).

Reagrds,
Tom Barr

In my fully planted tanks, I can put fish in that day and never have a NH4 reading, with or without mulm, but adding mulm seems to help stabilize things better.

SW tanks take a little longer depending on what the set up involves(Fish only, Live rock, DBS, no sand, Refugiums, SPS vs Soft corals/Xenias etc).

I really don't think the systems are particularly complex unless you chose to assume them to be so. That notion makes them seem to be futile to generalize anything about them and their cycling.

I do not approach things that way. It does not really help in practical terms.

I work from the bottom up, the base of the chain, the plants, algae, and bacteria.

That's your foundation.
Happy plants= happy fish.

That's pretty simple, easy to see and easy to understand.
I've not had any diseases in close to 20 years since doing things this way.

If you provide then plants and anumals with the needs, they will do well, if you neglect the tank and do not do routine maintenance, then you can ask for trouble.
A well balanced tank has the inputs(fish food/dosing of fertilizers etc/Light/CO2 etc) = the outputs (water changes, plant/macro algae pruning/N2 gas from bacteria etc).

That's a simple 2 box model. Ecosystems are comllex, but these tanks of ours are far far removed frrom a true ecosystem. Our habits and rates of in/outputs play the largest roles in their success.



Regards,
Tom Barr

Last edited by plantbrain at 23-Jan-2005 03:30