courtesy of Lanids
One of the monthly aquarium magazines just published an interesting bit of information about cycling a newly established tank to get rid of the ammonia spikes that are deadly to fish. Fish waste, food waste, and plant decay all produce ammonia, which is a compound of nitrogen and hydrogen. Beneficial bacteria, so conventional wisdom goes, convert the ammonia into nitrogen or a nitrogen compound that plants can metabolize. The bacteria, when well established, then eat up and convert all of the ammonia in the aquarium. Getting the bacteria established and doing their thing is what takes all the time of cycling an aquarium. I suppose we’ve all read that before.
The magazine article stated that live plants can control nitrogen spikes from day one. In other words, they say that cycling is not necessary if the aquarium has plenty of live plants. Usually when I’m setting up a new tank, I start with live plants and a little bit of gravel from an established aquarium, and i don’t bother testing for ammonia for about three weeks, when the cycle should be in its last stages. I always get zero ammonia, but now I wonder if that’s due to the plants or the completion of the cycle. Of course, you should never add fish to an aquarium that has ammonia, but I’m going to experiment with two tanks that are just now in the setup process. Maybe the plants will make a difference. I’ll let you know.
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In both of the new tanks, I measured ammonia almost every day for several weeks. Just to be sure of the results I used two different test kits; neither detected a measurable ammount of ammonia. Both aquariums started out with a generous amount of hornwort, some laterite, Malaysian driftwood, Indian almond leaves and under gravel filtering. They now have additional plants, and one is home to eight juvenile angelfish. If I didn’t mess up the experiment, the hornwort seems to have worked. However, that doesn’t mean it will fully compensate for over crowding, over feeding, or lack of maintenance.