Seeking evidence/stories re: high ammonia, nitrites during cycle

[threnjen]

Hi folks,

I'm gathering information for my own personal science project / agenda.

I'm looking for some articles describing the effects of high ammonia or nitrites during a fishless cycle. I'm specifically looking for links/articles that scientifically support the supposed negative effects of ammonia or nitrites being high during the cycle.

I'm also ok hearing any anecdotal evidence of your fishless cycle stalling due to what you believe was high ammonia or nitrites. Please your personal anecdotes only, and not those of a friend of a friend of a friend. If you post your personal experience with a fishless cycle stall, can you please also provide the stats on your source water (kH, gH) and if you tested your pH during the stall.

Thank you and I hope that I can get some responses to add to my research!

Edit: I'm not seeking information on the cycle process itself or the nitrogen cycle, as I understand it very well. I am doing research on the claim that the two types of nitrifying bacteria (nitrosonomas and then nitrobacter) are adversely affected when levels of ammonia and nitrite respectively are too high.

 

[gilpi]

I retracted my previous message

 

[threnjen]

Im sure you will find many articles on the net on this topic.
What is exactly a "fishless" cycle to you?
As far my personal experience....Filters do need to go through a cycle but they do need a source of ammonia... fish waste etc. in order to start the cycle. I have always used "tougher" fish that could stand the cycling or cheaper feeder fish the few times I had to start from scratch, long process but works. For the most part I almost always used media from an established filter and it was pretty much ready to go.... but very slowly adding fish till the filter built the bacterial colony to its max.
Again, I pretty sure a search on the net will give you more than you can handle.
Not sure if this is what you're looking for but I hope it helps !

That's not exactly what I'm looking for, but I appreciate the reply! I will try to clarify my original post to better specify the information I am seeking.

 

[jlk]

Great topic for research purposes! Let's see if I can help you get this started and I will post some scientific info when I am back home in few days (notebooks are at home).

In respect to ammonia levels in a fishless cycle, I am honestly not sure at what point ammonia goes from a food source for bacteria to a disinfectant that kills bacteria. Ammonia and ammonium compounds are well recognized in both household and clinical/medical settings for the ability to clean and disinfect. 8ppm is the max I have tried in a very well established tank but this is beyond overkill for almost all situations.

In respect to nitrites stalling a cycle, I have encountered this before. I don't know at what level nitrites became a negative issue as the API tests are limited to 5ppm and strips to 10ppm. Basically, after 3 weeks, nothing was progressing and things started to regress. Any nitrates disappeared and ammonia that was processed easily in 24hrs was no longer processed. Ph was unchanged. Wcs, 90+%, brought nitrites down to readable levels after four consecutive changes of almost 100% in one day and ammonia doses were dropped. The cycle completed within a week at 4ppm with gradual ammonia increases (and some more big wcs).

Ph is the only other issue that I have encountered to cause a cycle crash. This was the product of laziness over anything else. I have played around with my main qt tank quite a bit with ammonia dosing and forgot wcs for over a month. Continued to dose ammonia weekly or biweekly. Then happened to notice all the pond snails were dead. Tested everything and the ammonia was 4+, zero nitrite and nitrate and the ph barely even registered 6 (normally 8-8.2) so I am not sure how low it actually was. Kh and Gh were both zero (normally off the charts high). Changed all the water and things were back to normal within a week. Pond snails (for the record) seem unaffected by high ammonia doses but an acific ph was definitely a killer.

Hopefully, some members can provide their experiences as well!! Feel free to ask any questions!

 

[jlk]

I can not edit from the app but I did want to mention one important point here. What may occur or apply to my tank conditions definitely does not apply to everyone else!

We all have vastly different water sources with a wide variety of minerals, buffers, TDS and other constituents that can positively or negatively affect a cycle. So, unless we are starting from the exact same source of water with the exact same chemicals added and the exact same conditions (ie, filter, media, tank, substrate, temp, dosing schedule, type of ammonia, methods of testing,etcetc), it's a bit difficult to compare one person's experiences to another's or even multiple others as we are all on completely different playing fields. Just something to keep in mind here!

 

[threnjen]

Fabulous jlk! This type of thing is just what I'm looking for, thank you!

If anyone is SUPER interested in the science side of things, I should add that we have a very science-y discussion going on over in this thread: http://www.aquariumadvice.com/forums/f12/post-your-test-data-287003-4.html
I've linked to page 4 where we started talking about things in depth.

One personal reason I am researching this is that I learned to cycle with MASSIVE levels of ammonia. I have a test bucket running with about 18ppm ammonia (an estimate based on how much I have added) and it's currently cycling successfully. It's far into the nitrite phase and also has nitrate readings.
Over in that other thread we are looking for papers on the nitrogen cycle and information on studies done that scientifically show the effects of high ammonia and nitrites on the cycle. I've compiled a lot of papers to read, just haven;t gotten to them yet.

Anyway if any of this sounds interesting to you or anyone else I invite you over to that thread to join our science experiment.

If I can also recruit others for our testing session in a week or so that will be an added bonus. I will be able to test two sets of things but as you mentioned, source water differs so it will only be valid results for my specific circumstances.

 

[threnjen]

Also I'd like to add, as I can no longer edit my Op that we now know that the nitrite->nitrate bacteria may be nitrospira, not nitrobacter, but this may or may not depend on cycling conditions. Anyway. If anyone's inner nerd is tingling after these tidbits, hop over to that other thread.

I would still like to hear others chime in about cycle stalls of course! It's all in the name of science