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Aquarium

Cycling Fish Tank With Fish

Cycling your new fish tank with live fish will be one of the most important steps in the aquarium setup process. It does not matter if you are setting up goldfish, community fish, South American Cichlid, African Cichlid, or a saltwater tank.

You will need to cycle the fish tank first. I recommend doing this after setting up the aquarium filter.

Okay, so let me explain what the cycle process means.

The easiest way to explain it would be that the fish in the tank live in a closed environment and they discharge their waste in it. What happens is you feed the fish their food. The fish eat the food and discharge waste (go to the restroom) creating bacteria. That waste goes through a process called a cycle. The first step in the cycle is ammonia, followed by nitrite, and nitrate. High levels of any of these are considered critically dangerous and will kill the fish. Usually, I have found in new tank setups, there will be high levels of ammonia. This will kill the fish off very fast if no water change is done, right away!

You will always need to cycle a new tank setup with some fish to get the good bacteria level at a safe rate. I usually recommend starting with only two or three fish at a time. It does not matter if you have a 10 gallon or 100 gallon tank. For the first 15 to 30 days I recommend only having two or 3 fish in the tank when cycling. If you put too many fish in a new tank setup and try to cycle it I guarantee that 70% of the fish will die of high measures of ammonia.

So lets say you set your tank up and cycled it correctly, only feeding two times a day with two or three fish. It has been around two to three weeks and you want to add some more fish. I recommend that you perform a water test before adding more fish. You will need to test for the ammonia, nitrite and nitrate levels for freshwater tanks. If you are doing a saltwater tank test for ammonia, nitrate, nitrite, phosphate, PH, and salinity levels. If the results read safe then you are ready to start adding more fish to your new tank setups.

Last, I recommend performing a water test at least once a month. This is just a good idea for long term tank maintenance and success. Have fun and be patient when starting out all new aquarium tank cycles.