Yet another cycling question

The friendliest place on the web for anyone with an interest in aquariums or fish keeping!
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.

Mr Crabs

Aquarium Advice Apprentice
Joined
May 24, 2004
Messages
46
Location
Redondo Beach, CA
Ok so I am getting 60lbs more LR today to basically start a new cycle. Put a fresh shrimp in saturday with my 30lbs of Fiji from LFS even though I knew I was adding a lot more LR today, didnt think it would hurt but did it because I was impatient. After 2 days the shrimp looked like it blew up like a balloon and had a sort of a cloudy/transparent white cacoon around it. Now it seems like it is slowly disolving and is a lot smaller than the shrimp that I put in. I have not put on the protein skimmer yet because I figured the crap in the water will help the LR cycle. I do have a regular HOB filter that came with the tank and running AC with it. The filter is disgusting and brown. I turned off the power pulled the cartride out and it seems a lot heavier and filled with gunk. I assume decaying shrimp goo. Ammonia spiked but is coming down a lot and now in the .5 range. Nitrites are coming down too from 5.0 to about 3.0 and nitrates are off the charts. I guess my question is does this sound normal? One more thing I asked this before but nobody responded. Is it recommend to add BIOSAFE or anything like that to you tank even though I used RO/DI water? TIA
 
If you was curing rock you didnt need to use the shrimp method in addition.

Just add the new rock to the tank. Dont worry about adding another shrimp. Monitor the ammonia levels and if they get to high you might want to consiter a water change so as to preserve as much life on the rock as possible.

I see no need to add biosafe.
 
Back
Top Bottom