Haven't the slightly clue on what to do

[luntiz]

After 3 weeks of being out of the hobby, I decided to start it up again. I am not a complete newbie but I'm a bit lost right now. I had 70lbs of Fiji LR that dried out. I put them all into my new tank and checked ammonia levels; it is at 1.5ppm and has been like that for 4 days. My question is, since my LR is dead due to drying out, what should I do to establish the necessary organisms/bacterias? I've been told to toss in a damsel to "boost" the process. I've also been told to buy some more LR to seed the organisms. What should I do?

 

[indy]

DON"T put any fish in to "boost" the process. The bacteria you need are already in the tank, you just need to be patient enough to allow them to mass produce to take care of the water. All fish do is introduce waste to rot and produce ammonia. Since you have all that dead rock in there, the bio load is already present, just wait for the bacteria to mass produce. Putting a live fish into that enviroment is cruel, imagine trying to breath in an environment that will let you live, but will burn your lungs with every breath. You can put more live rock in, but generally cycling with live rock is done because there will be some die-off which will produce ammonia, which you already have. Any tube worms or interesting life will likely also die due to the environment. Just be patient and let the tank cycle as is, then add live rock and go from there. You'll have a much healthier system.

If you want to boost your system, see if your lfs or someone in the hobby will give you some live sand from and established tank. This will have a good bacteria population to begin reproducing and spread through your tank. This will cut down on your cycle time. But be aware that if you have 70 pounds of dead material, that's a huge bio-load that will have to be taken care of and will take some time. Remember, nothing good happens fast in a saltwater aquarium, but bad things happen overnight.