Andy Sager
Aquarium Advice Addict
Better safe than sorry.
How did my female guppies have babies?
- Thread starter pettygil
- Start date
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Andy Sager
Aquarium Advice Addict
A lot. You won't even have to get more Guppies than what you already have. They will fill it for you.
If you want them to fill it faster, just get one male and put it in with the females. 
I am going to get a new 40 gallon long fish tank for my guppies.. How do i cycle it quick? I have a sponge in my fish tank and fake plants. I also have fritz Bacteria. Can I take the sponge from my cycled tank. can I use it to swish around in my tank? Can I put guppies in tank, or wait for it to cycle first.
af2018
Aquarium Advice Regular
The fastest I’ve been able to cycle a tank was by adding water from an existing tank as well as using cycle fish. I would not put any fish you care about in the uncycled tank.
The male Molly that impregnated my females was a cycle fish several times and somehow survived everytime! He earned his new home and is doing really well. But that was never the expected result with him. I was hoping he’d die in one of those cycles so I wouldn’t have to put him back with my females and / or I’d no longer need a tank just to accommodate him.
The male Molly that impregnated my females was a cycle fish several times and somehow survived everytime! He earned his new home and is doing really well. But that was never the expected result with him. I was hoping he’d die in one of those cycles so I wouldn’t have to put him back with my females and / or I’d no longer need a tank just to accommodate him.
Using water from a cycled tank will do nothing to help cycle a new tank. The microbes responsible for your cycle dont live in the water. They live on surface area, so thats on your substrate, on your aquascape, on the glass your aquarium is made of, but mostly it lives in your filter media. All you will transfer from one tank to another by transfering water is any pathogens that are present in the water.
Transferring some substrate, some piece of aquascape from an established aquarium will help cycle a new tank. Better still take a small amount of filter media from an established filter and use it in your new filtration, or squeeze out a sponge from an established filter into the water of the new aquarium.
There is no guarantee this will quickly cycle a tank, but it should speed up how long it takes. The Fritz product might help too.
You then need to decide if you want to cycle the new tank before getting fish (fishless cycle) or cycle the tank using fish (fish in cycle). You previously did a fish in cycle when that god awful fish store you go to lent you fish to cycle the tank. If you want to do a fishless cycle you will need an ammonia source like Dr Tims Ammonium Chloride and patience. Even doing everything mentioned above it could still take a couple of months, but more likely 2 or 3 weeks.
Transferring some substrate, some piece of aquascape from an established aquarium will help cycle a new tank. Better still take a small amount of filter media from an established filter and use it in your new filtration, or squeeze out a sponge from an established filter into the water of the new aquarium.
There is no guarantee this will quickly cycle a tank, but it should speed up how long it takes. The Fritz product might help too.
You then need to decide if you want to cycle the new tank before getting fish (fishless cycle) or cycle the tank using fish (fish in cycle). You previously did a fish in cycle when that god awful fish store you go to lent you fish to cycle the tank. If you want to do a fishless cycle you will need an ammonia source like Dr Tims Ammonium Chloride and patience. Even doing everything mentioned above it could still take a couple of months, but more likely 2 or 3 weeks.
af2018
Aquarium Advice Regular
It must’ve worked for me bc I dumped all the water including the ickys down in the substrate into my 55. I had this 55 cycled in about 3 weeks by doing that and I had a couple fish in there that I didn’t care about for good measure.
Btw I know I’m cycled but a post on here really wigged me out. Someone saying they’ve had a tank going for a year and they didn’t think it cycled still
so I’m super paranoid. I’ve been using the bottled bacteria every water change. But I know mines for sure cycled. Still a terrifying thought. I don’t want all this effort to be for nothing
I also put a filter in there from my old tank I forgot about that. I didn’t leave it in there long bc it wasn’t doing anything! It was a 10 gallon filter I had that and a 45 but I knew that small one wasn’t touching anything so I went and bought a 2nd 45 which I now have in there.
Btw I know I’m cycled but a post on here really wigged me out. Someone saying they’ve had a tank going for a year and they didn’t think it cycled still
so I’m super paranoid. I’ve been using the bottled bacteria every water change. But I know mines for sure cycled. Still a terrifying thought. I don’t want all this effort to be for nothingI also put a filter in there from my old tank I forgot about that. I didn’t leave it in there long bc it wasn’t doing anything! It was a 10 gallon filter I had that and a 45 but I knew that small one wasn’t touching anything so I went and bought a 2nd 45 which I now have in there.
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af2018
Aquarium Advice Regular
But i didn’t buy that 2nd 45 until after it was cycled so maybe it’s all bc I put that stupid 10 gallon filter in? I truly don’t know Aiken.. what worked for me? for future reference. Obviously I did a combination of things I believed to work at the time.
What fish can I cycle a 40 gallon tank? Which I can keep with guppies? I do not think a Gold fish would help, but the Gold Fish is very hardy. I cycled tank like that before. I did take the Gold Fish back to the store, but it did help cycle the tank.
The thing with fish in cycling is you are only cycled sufficiently for the number of fish you use to cycle. If you use 2 fish, you are only going to grow enough microbes to support those 2 fish. If you then add more fish your cycle needs to catch up and grow more microbes. If you only add a small amount each time you add fish, then your cycle doesnt need to catch up very much. If you go from 2 fish during your fish in cycle to then fully stock a tank then your cycle needs to catch up a lot. There is a massive difference between cycled enough for 2 fish in a 55 gallon tank and being cycled enough to fully stock it. 3 weeks to cycle a tank enough for 2 fish sounds about right, but thats a long way from being cycled.It must’ve worked for me bc I dumped all the water including the ickys down in the substrate into my 55. I had this 55 cycled in about 3 weeks by doing that and I had a couple fish in there that I didn’t care about for good measure.
Btw I know I’m cycled but a post on here really wigged me out. Someone saying they’ve had a tank going for a year and they didn’t think it cycled still
I also put a filter in there from my old tank I forgot about that. I didn’t leave it in there long bc it wasn’t doing anything! It was a 10 gallon filter I had that and a 45 but I knew that small one wasn’t touching anything so I went and bought a 2nd 45 which I now have in there.
You really have no idea if dumping all the water did anything useful. You have no way of comparing how long it would take to cycle if you hadnt done this. Even if you sat 2 identical tanks next to each other, and cycled them both exactly the same, each would progress at a different rate. Like i said, 3 weeks sound about right for 2 fish in a 55g because that's an extremely low bioload. Going from scratch to cycled enough to fully stock is completely different. I very much doubt that dumping water from an established did anything to help. Its all risk for no benefit. Very bad idea to do that.
As to the thread about a year old tank not being cycled, its worth a read. He really had nothing to worry about and didn't need to change anything. The nitrogen cycle won't function in acidic water like he had, so its essentially impossible to cycle. But it doesnt matter, because ammonia isnt toxic in acidic water either. He really didnt need to cycle his tank, and went to a lot of effort raising carbonate hardness and pH with no benefit. His fish were healthy. I really tried to discourage his attempts at cycling the tank.
Going a bit off topic now. If you want to continue this discussion about cycling, please create a new thread.
Please don't use fish to cycle a tank you dont intend to keep long term. We should be promoting ethical fish keeping, and using fish you are planning to just return once you are done with them just isnt right. We are going back to the practices of that awful fish store again.
Start your cycle with 3 or 4 of your guppies in a 40g tank.
Should I add guppies right away, or wait a few days. For my fish in cycle. I am going to put tank in my bed room. I do have a stand but I do not trust my tank on. I have a very long dresser top, that is rock solid and long enough for my fish tank.
Follow this thread for a fish in cycle.
www.aquariumadvice.com
But set all the equipment up, run it for 24 hours to make sure everything works OK, drain it down, set up your aquascape, refill with water conditioner etc, get it up to temperature and move over your fish.
Fish In Cycle Guide.
STAGE 1 – SET UP AND PREPARATION. Set up the aquarium, stand, filtration, lighting, heater if required and any other equipment. Fill the tank and run for 24 hours to ensure there are no leaks and that all the equipment functions correctly. Drain the tank. Aquascape including substrate...
www.aquariumadvice.com
But set all the equipment up, run it for 24 hours to make sure everything works OK, drain it down, set up your aquascape, refill with water conditioner etc, get it up to temperature and move over your fish.
Andy Sager
Aquarium Advice Addict
There is much debate on which microbe or microbes are actually doing the nitrification but one thing holds true about them all: They are aerobic in nature so they will be found where there is an oxygen level high enough to support them. The higher the oxygen level, the more microbes will be found there. This is why you find more of them in the filter/ filter material because that usually has the highest oxygen level in a tank. (In deep bed tanks, anaerobic bacteria form under the substrate where there is less oxygen to convert nitrate into nitrate gas which gets eliminated through bubbles so it's possible to have both aerobic and anaerobic microbes in a tank at the same time but they will not be in the same place(s) in the aquarium. ) They are surface dwellers as well. They do not produce free swimming spores so your adding the water would at best only have added a minute amount of microbes that were scraped off another surface. In your case, the filter you added is where the microbes came from in enough volume to cycle your aquarium faster. The fact that it was only a 10 gallon filter really plays little in this event. That filter was cycled for the amount of fish that were in that 10 gallon tank and it wouldn't have mattered if the filter was moved to a larger tank, a much larger tank or even a much smaller tank, there will be enough microbes present to handle the bioload of however many fish were in that 10 gallon tank at the time the filter was moved. As Aiken and I have said repeatedly, it's not about the water, it's about the materials in the tank.
Just to bring this full circle, as Aiken explained, when doing fish in cycling, when the biological bed is fully established meaning 0 ammonia, 0 nitrite and an increasing amount of nitrate, there are only enough microbes present to handle the bioload at the time the cycling process finished. That could be 1 fish, 10 fish, 10000 fish. It doesn't matter. If you fish in cycle a tank with 1 or 2 fish, you cannot add say, 10 more fish when the cycle finishes and not expect the tank to go through another period of adjustment while the bacteria bed catches up with the new ammonia level. You have to add more fish slowly over a longer period of time to keep the new ammonia level to a safe level for the existing fish while the biological filter bed grows. Because the biological filter grows and shrinks to the amount of ammonia currently present, the benefits of doing a fishless cycle is that you are using an ammonia amount usually much higher than you will have from however many fish you will put into the tank when it finishes cycling. All that will happen is that the biological bed will be shrinking to a level that can handle the ammonia level present. You won't see it as you will with a fish in cycle as you see it through ammonia tests as the level rises.
Lastly, if you cycled a tank for say 20 fish but you moved or lost say 10 fish and kept those 10 fish for maybe 6 months or a year, you no longer have a biological filter bed for 20 fish. Don't think " I used to have 20 fish in this tank so I'm going to add that many back in " because your next question will be "Why did the ammonia level go crazy in my cycled tank when I added back the 10 fish to bring the total back to 20? "
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