Another Cycling Question

[reice05]

Ok so i got my setup up and running Finally... For a week i just had water,liverock,heater and a powerhead in the tank, this past tuesday i added 80lbs of livesand it has all kinds of worms,snails, etc.. It also came with like 12 Nassarius Snails..the water finally cleared up after 2 days of me pushing the sand around to fill empty areas. So my question is should i still add raw shrimp?

 

[meowzer]

Have you tested the water yet? If you get ammonia on your own, then you should not need the shrimp.....if you do not have any ammonia, you can add the shrimp to bring it on

 

[aquaguy24]

were u testing ur water when u had live rock in there for a week..cycle might of already started or even done before u added the sand..test the water and post the numbers....

 

[reice05]

At first i had the live rock in a rubbermaid then when i moved which was aug 1 i put the rock in the tank with new saltwater a week after that i added the live sand which brings us to today. so i just did a water test and here are my results
salinity- 1.024
ph-7.8 maybe 8.0
ammonia-0
nitrite-0
nitrate-0

 

[sepulatian]

If you have live rock and live sand, containing inverts, then you do not need to add a shrimp at all. You may want to ghost feed your tank with a bit of fish food to keep the bacteria alive, but you do not want to cause an ammonia spike. There is no need to. If the sand came with all of that then it is most certainly full of biological bacteria. Keep testing your ammonia. If it does not spike, with all of the sand stirring and moving things, then you are good to go. Ghost feed the tank while your new fish is in QT.

 

[reice05]

Ghost feed?

 

[joerdie]

By Ghost feed, he means giving the tank food even though there is nothing to feed. Nothing you can see anyway as the food will break down and "feed" bacteria that will keep the cycle going.