[AquaticLife] Reverse a Reverse??
Yes.
But remember that when you moved all the fish and all of the nitrifying bacteria from the small tank to the big tank, you were basically transferring a majority of the nitrifying bacteria that had already grown to a proper size to handle the bioload in the smaller tank. Whether it’s a 5G tank or a 30G tank, if there are five fish, then there will only be enough nitrifying bacteria to handle that bioload. If you move a large percentage of the N-bacteria from one tank to another while not moving any fish, the current tank will show a mini-cycle proportional to the amount of N-bacteria moved. If it’s only a very small percentage, then the ammonia/nitrite levels will probably never show up on our test kits. If you move 50% of the N-Bacteria, then you will be more likely to see the mini-cycle until the remaining 50% duplicate enough to grow the colony back to full size.
All that said, this cloning process can be done much quicker than waiting 4 or 6 weeks. As long as you are good about keeping the N-bacteria alive when transplanting them, they’ll live and are capable of doubling their colony size every 24-48 hours, depending on the overall ecology of the tank(s).
If you have a tank with 10 equal sized fish, you could take the filter media from that tank and cut it into 10 pieces and set up each fish in it’s own tank with 1/10th of the media and all 10 tanks should be “cycled”. As soon as you add more fish to any of the tanks, the tank will see a mini-cycle in proportion to the increased bioload.
Or.. if you just remove a small piece of cycled media and put it in the running filter of an uncycled tank, you can then start the manual addition of plain ammonia (3-5 drops per gallon) and since you seeded the new filter system, that tank will become fully cycled in as little as 7-10 days.
Lenny Vasbinder Fish Blog - http://GoldLenny.blogspot.com (Links to any articles referenced in above reply are listed on the right side, alphabetically under Labels and also under Archives by Year, Month)
Category: Philippines Internet Koi Society
