Cycling, still no ammonia!!

bryanb85

New member
I started my cycle 5 days ago. 75 gal with 75 lbs of dry rock. My first 3 days had no ammonia so i added a piece of shrimp 2 days ago and still no ammonia. Am i doing something wrong or does this process just take a long time!?

Any tips or advice for my first ever cycle would be great. Thoughts on fluval beneficial bacteria?
 
I've always helped the cycle with Instant Ocean Bio-Spira. It's cheap on Amazon and will spike ammonia within hours. With that said I still have always waited at least three weeks before adding my first fish.
 
Im using red sea marine kit. I have not levels of anything. I heard dry rock takes longer but didnt think this long with the shrimp!
 
You need an ammonia source to start with, and with dry rock there isn't anything to die off and create that ammonia. So for the first few days, there was nothing really going on. Until you added the shrimp there was nothing to create the ammonia.

Now that the shrimp is in there, you can start the clock ticking! I'd say give it a week (from now... not 5 days ago) and you should start to see some ammonia.
 
I recommend pureeing the shrimp and distributing it evenly in your tank.

A shrimp may not be enough for your tank though. I added like 15g of marinara mix to my barely-10gallon-tank to kickstart everything. I'd recommend more like 110g of shrimps or whatever aquatic creature you like into your tank.

Remember, even if you are basically spiking your tank with ammonia, it's fine. :)

Since you are starting off with dry rock, the relatively large amount of seafood is necessary even, to really propagate your bacteria - otherwise they can only feed on what's in the tank, and that may not be much.

Ammonia in and of itself doesn't do everything, it's just an energy provider. Bacteria needs other things to actually be able to grow and reproduce.

That's also why I'd recommend pureeing your seafood, to spread it all over. :D
 
I bought some cheap damsels and put in mine to help get it cycling feed them like crazy and they all ended up living through it! Catching them later was the hard part.
 
cycling with fish is a thing of the past. fish are not necessary to start a nitrogen cycle. raw shrimps work just fine.
 
+1 to not using live fish.

I wouldn't purée the shrimp. At some point you will want to allow the ammonia levels to drop. Leave it whole. When your nitrites and nitrates are high you can scoop it out. If you want it to work faster, toss in another shrimp. You'll have a heck of a time trying to scoop purée out when you're ready to let the ammonia drop so you can add livestock.
 
I started my cycle 5 days ago. 75 gal with 75 lbs of dry rock. My first 3 days had no ammonia so i added a piece of shrimp 2 days ago and still no ammonia. Am i doing something wrong or does this process just take a long time!?

Any tips or advice for my first ever cycle would be great. Thoughts on fluval beneficial bacteria?

Did you very finely chop up the shrimp? Better yet is blend it into milk.

Whole chunks of protein decays slowly and the small population of existing bacteria may be able to process the slow generating ammonia and refuse to reproduce.

To cause rapid increase in bacteria population, one has to overload the ammonia processing capacity of existing bacteria.
 
+1 to not using live fish.

I wouldn't purée the shrimp. At some point you will want to allow the ammonia levels to drop. Leave it whole. When your nitrites and nitrates are high you can scoop it out. If you want it to work faster, toss in another shrimp. You'll have a heck of a time trying to scoop purée out when you're ready to let the ammonia drop so you can add livestock.

I disagree, though I think you may be missing my point.

The point of pureeing is to allow for a more even distribution of the... puree.

On top of what wooden_reefer stated, leaving a dead shrimp in one place also tend to confine a lot of chemicals to relatively the same spot. Pureeing it, or finely chopping it, or essentially making it small bits allows for the pump to spread it absolutely everywhere.

Ammonia later on can be reduced with a big water change. Or two. Or more. :)

Since it's tiny, tiny, tiny bits as well, it'll break down much faster and so generate ammonia much faster. There'll be a huge spike, but when you need to lower it, you don't have to take out the puree, because by then well, it's not producing ammonia anymore. XD

Or shouldn't be anyways.

The added benefit is that this is being used by the microbes themselves to reproduce. So you get a bigger population, faster as well.

Bacteria reproduce well, once or so every 20 minutes. So if they have ample food, they'll be able to multiply rapidly. But with just ammonia, it won't work.

They're just like us. Oxygen for example, is very important to us, but oxygen enough doesn't allow us to develop and reproduce. We need well, other chemicals.

Same with bacteria, they need ammonia, and more. Of course, as the whole shrimp decays, some of it does spread elsewhere, but no where near as fast as well, just using puree. :D
 
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