Fish in Question

[RooRoo]

Hi everyone. It's me again....for a quick refresher, I have a 40 gal tank with 6 zebra danios, an aquaclear 70 filter. I use Prime for a conditioner, and add aquarium salt during water changes. I am doing a fish in cycle, I just ended week number 4. I am very good with water changes, and have kept ammonia below .25, highest it went was .50. I have yet to see any nitrites though. Is that normal? I have about 5ppm nitrates. pH has been steady.

A friend told me by doing so many water changes and keeping ammonia low, I have no food for nitrites and that I need to let it get above 1.0 for several days to feed the good bacteria.

One of my fish did get finrot in his tail. He totally disengaged from the other fish for about a week. But I started adding salt (didn't know freshwater tank needed salt, my bad) and everything is fine now. Other than that, the fish have been very active. I feed them Hakari Micro bites, they didn't like the wardley flakes I fed them first, which is weird because the store fed that food. So anyway, the fish seem perfectly fine, but I can't get any nitrites, anything I should be doing?

 

[librarygirl]

Hm why are you adding salt to every water change? Unless you are treating for disease you shouldn't need salt in a freshwater tank for most fish. The fin rot could be because of the ammonia levels, some fish are very sensitive to them. It's normal to not see nitrites for a while when doing a fish-in cycle as you need to keep the levels safe for the fish. It will happen eventually. If you listen to your friend and let your ammonia, etc levels rise you'll have sick or dead fish. Just keep up with the water changes, don't be afraid to do large ones or even more than one in a day to keep ammonia and nitrite under 0.25 and nitrates under 40 (most say nitrates can go very high even with fish but you probably dont want to stress them out anymore than they already are).

I'd let someone else reply with advice about the salt just to be sure, but I don't think you need it in normal circumstances for a freshwater tank.