This is quoted from Mark’s Pet Fish Forum

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Letting your tank cycle is essential when first setting up a fish tank.

When a fish produces waste, and when there is left over food that rots, there are toxic chemicals released into the water. If these chemicals build up to a high enough concentration they can kill your fish. When you cycle your tank you are actually just letting the tank build up colonies of beneficial bacteria. What the beneficial bacteria does is it will take these toxic chemicals and actually feed on them and transform them into neutral chemicals.

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First you must understand that when you first setup a tank it is bacteria free, but as soon as you add your water there are two group of beneficial bacteria added, for those who care, their names are Nitosomonas and Nitrobacter. These are aerobic types of bacteria and are found in well oxygenated areas of the tank, mainly the filter. What they do is take oxygen and bind it to ammonia (fish waste) and transform it into nitrites (NO2-) and then transform it into nitrates (NO3-). In the end this bacteria is taking harmful chemicals and making them neutral, which is a good thing.

If you are doing this with plants then that is even better. The plants will absorb much of the toxic chemicals and filter the water for you. Some people who have successful planted tanks don’t even use filters. They just do normal water changes and let the plants take care of the filtering. But even if you plan on having plants you can still have a filter, it’s just that if you have enough plants you won’t need one.

Now to actually cycle the tank.

First I practice what’s called “fishless cycling,” I don’t much care for fish cycling so I won’t describe that method here, but I will make a separate post for that all together.
The main goal when fishless cycling is to add “bad bacteria” to the tank so that the “beneficial bacteria” can eat and get ready for the fish waste, and rotting food, without harming any fish in this process. Here is how you would do this.

What you do is you will add food to the fully setup tank as if there were fish in it. You will then do normal water changes. So basically act as if fish are in there. You will do this for about a week and a half, to two weeks. This will give the beneficial bacteria time to cultivate, that doesn’t mean that you can add a ton of fish right away after this waiting period is up. You will want to add the smallest of the fishes that you want first. So if your getting guppies and tetras and say a Betta here is how you would want to add them.

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First add the tetras, let them be in the tank for about 2-3 days, letting the beneficial bacteria grow to a large enough population to compensate for the waste produced by them.
Second, add the guppies. Wait about 2-3 days again. The same thing will being going on with the beneficial bacteria.
And finally add the Betta. The beneficial bacteria will be able to handle the waste load and rotting food of all these fish, and it will insure that your fish don’t die from bad tank conditions.

But there is a common problem people have if you decide to skip adding that fish slowly and add them all at once. It’s called “New Tank Syndrome.” What happens is people will add too many fish, overloading the beneficial bacteria. The beneficial bacteria is still growing, and some people say, “well why isn’t it destroying the toxic chemicals?” It may still be growing but the population still isn’t great enough to combat the ammonia, which usually results in the fish’s death.

If you do decide to add all the fish at once, you have to be on top of the water changes then. You will need to make more frequent water changes for about the first month. When you do water changes you are manually removing the ammonia and so it’s still possible to add all the fish, but I don’t recommend it It’s just more work that you have to do, and less time to enjoy watching the fish.

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