Confused about my cycle. Can it restart?

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nygator79

Aquarium Advice Newbie
Joined
Jul 9, 2011
Messages
4
Hi everyone, I am new to the saltwater world and am confused about my cycle. I have a 75g tank filled with 50 pounds of regular rock from reef cleaners and 35 pounds of cured live rock from my LFS. I have had the tank together for little over a week now. I introduced two medium raw shrimp on the first day in a mesh bag to get the cycle going. I have not been turning on any lights and have had my protein skimmer running since day one. It is pulling plenty of dark, smelly stuff from it. I have been testing my levels ph, ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate, and salinity levels from day 1. So far I only received a small ammonia spike to about 0.5ppm, nitrite to 1ppm and nitrate to 20ppm. Salinity is in between 1.023-1.024, ph is 8.0. Temp at 79 degrees. Well yesterday I tested my water and it seemed like ammonia was down to 0 (so hard to tell the ammonia on the API color chart for me but it was the lightest it has ever been), nitrite was clearly 0 and nitrate was 40ppm. Today though it seems like the ammonia went back up to 0.5ppm (darker today) and nitrite is still 0 and nitrate is still 40. I am confused. I know little over a week is not enough time for the cycle to finish but why would everything seem to be progressing and all of a sudden it seems to have restarted. Should I remove the shrimp? Should I do a water change? I'm just confused and have learned so much from this forum already. Thank you all!
 
if you used cured live rock thats the reason you probably cycled quickly and if you left the raw shrimp in there thats probably why your ammonia keeps rising then falling
 
The LFS told me it was fully cured live rock. I also added mixture of aragonite sand and live sand which I forgot to mention when first starting things up. So then what should I do next? Remove the shrimp? Water change?
 
i would remove the shrimp and do a water change as this point and see where your nitrates,ammonia and nitrite are but usually when you have nitrates and 0 ammonia and 0 nitrite your cycle is done
 
do a pwc and then add some fish food then check your readings after a while,if amm and trites are 0 then your cycled,ps you didnt need the skimmer running while you were cycling.
 
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