Ugh. The Cycle is Driving Me Nuts...

Alright everyone, I've had my Axolotl for nearly six weeks now.

He's a juvenile in a 10 gallon tank with tile for the bottom. I had been running just a sponge filter with an air pump. He's got two hides, one large "branch" type thing (it's fake, from PetSmart), and two moss balls floating around in there.

I feed him bloodworms because that's what he likes and I have enough of them to last another few weeks. When I get down to the last few days of those, I'll be trying to switch him over to earthworms. I clean up anything that he hasn't eaten after about an hour, and I clean up his waste whenever I see it in the tank...and it's checked multiple times every day.

I added a small HOB filter the other day because the water has been getting increasingly difficult to keep clean as he's gotten noticeably bigger than when I got him. It's just a small one, and I did a lot of work to make sure that the flow from it isn't bothering him...including buying a "floating turtle platform" that is mounted under the stream so that the stream doesn't hit the actual water, but instead that platform and then slowly leaks off the side.

Anyway...I've been testing the water almost daily since I got him with an API liquid master test kit.

Whenever the ammonia gets up to between .25 and .5ppm, I do a 25% water change and treat the water going into the tank with SeaChem Prime, which should detoxify the ammonia. I've contacted SeaChem to make sure that the Prime is okay to use with an Axolotl, and they told me that Prime shouldn't do any harm to the Axolotl.

The Axolotl seems happy. He eats just fine, keeps his gills mostly straight (they curve when he's startled or eating, and for a while after eating, but like right now they're just fine), and he doesn't seem to be distressed at all.

Anyway, I've yet to see ANY Nitrites or Nitrates in the tank.

I was told by the breeder that the axolotl was so small when I got him that he might not create enough waste to be able to adequately support a really good cycle. This made sense to me, because for the first two weeks or so that I had him, I barely saw any ammonia at all...on the test kit it would rarely even show near .25, unless I went a good 4-5 days without doing any water maintenance...and then it would show at just barely .25. So the idea that it wasn't creating enough of a bioload to get a cycle going made sense to me.

At this point, though, I feel like SOMETHING should be cycling...there should be SOME kind of progress, but it certainly doesn't seem like it.

I'm still just going about the process...testing, water change when it shows anything near between .25 and .5, and continuing to clean the tank the way that I have been.

I'm hoping that the new filter will aid in creating a colony of bacteria to get this cycle underway...I'd like to be able to stop fretting about it, and just test every few days or so.

The other issue I have is that I've read that Prime can cause ammonia readings to be incorrect...so I'm not really sure that I've even got the amount of ammonia in the tank that the test is showing...but I KNOW that there are no nitrites, and certainly no nitrates.

I just kind of wanted to vent a bit here about the frustrations.

I'm currently toying with the idea of just getting a larger tank now, and cycling it without anything in it while the Axolotl is in the 10 gallon tank he's in now. That way, once it's cycled, I can take some of the water out of the larger one, then add some water from his current tank and put him in the bigger one. I was planning on getting at least a 20L (trying to talk the wife into something even bigger) later this spring, but it almost makes sense to me to just get it now, get it cycled, and get him into that.

It's not that I MIND doing the maintenance on the tank...it's actually fun to me...but I do mind the fact that I worry about it. I'm the type of person that tends to fret over things like this...and this is driving me crazy!!!

Thanks for reading.
Jeff

You're line of thinking is correct, you'll probably need higher ammonia levels for a longer period of time to really kickstart a cycle; but obviously even with Prime you can only safely let levels get so high. I really rarely recommend cycling fish-in (or in this case axolotl in lol) for these reasons. I typically just seed my tanks with already cultured media nowadays, but back when I did a fishless cycle every time I set up a tank I always used a heavy dose of pure ammonia to really get the cycle going. Your best bet would be to cycle a tank without the little lotl in it for safer and more expedient results.

Karp said:

You're line of thinking is correct, you'll probably need higher ammonia levels for a longer period of time to really kickstart a cycle; but obviously even with Prime you can only safely let levels get so high. I really rarely recommend cycling fish-in (or in this case axolotl in lol) for these reasons. I typically just seed my tanks with already cultured media nowadays, but back when I did a fishless cycle every time I set up a tank I always used a heavy dose of pure ammonia to really get the cycle going. Your best bet would be to cycle a tank without the little lotl in it for safer and more expedient results.

Click to expand...

Yeah, the only reason I decided to give it a go was because I wanted a young Axolotl, and after talking to the breeder we kind of came to the conclusion that even if I DID cycle an empty tank, the Axolotl probably still wouldn't have been able to create enough bioload, and the cycle would most likely have crashed anyway.

The breeder seemed very knowledgeable and has been very helpful even after the sale, responding to my test messages within a couple of hours at most. He's a student at a university near me, and I got the impression that he works with the Axolotls in the lab, and kind of decided to start breeding them most likely for weekend party money!!!

I figured, if there was a good chance that the cycle was just going to crash and effectively need to be rebuilt from the ground up, I may as well just build it from the ground up to start.

I'm going to look at larger tanks tomorrow. If I end up getting one, I'll get the tile installed right away, then get it all set up and start running a cycle on it in the next few days. If I can get it cycled, then I'll just go ahead and switch the Axolotl into the new aquarium.

Prime binds ammonia nitrites and nitrates so if you test your parameters within 48hours after doing a water change I believe the readings can be incorrect.

I did a fairly large water change today...like a good 40-50%. I've been doing less, like 20%, and I noticed today that the tank was a bit cloudy. So I went ahead and vacuumed the bottom really well and did two of my buckets (which say they're 2.25 gallons on the bottom) worth of water change.

A few hours later, the water is much clearer.

I figure in this tank I'm going to just continue going about trying to cycle it slowly...I don't mind the water changes, I actually quite enjoy them...I've also gotten pretty good at them, getting a single bucket done in less than 5 minutes (and that's with carrying it downstairs from the sink, and with a fairly low water pressure so it takes a good 2 minutes to fill a bucket).

In the meantime, I'm in the process of getting a 20 Long set up. I got the aquarium today, ordered a canister filter tonight, and tomorrow will most likely be grabbing a stand and a glass top so I can start working on getting it set up. I'll be once again doing tile on the bottom, because it was easy, fun, and I think it looks pretty good. I'll probably be picking up the tile and the aquarium sealant tomorrow to get that put in, so that as soon as the filter shows up in a few days I can fill it with water and get started on cycling that.

My plan is to cycle the 20 long while continuing to work on the 10 gallon, and once the 20 long is cycled, move the Axolotl into the 20 gallon tank and then most likely change my 10 gallon over to a nice little shrimp tank.

I figure that with this setup that I'll be working with for the 20, I'll have enough filtration that's adjustable enough (with a spray bar, too) to be able to get good filtration without too much flow, and I'll also have enough power on hand to add a chiller this spring/summer if I need to. On top of that, I'll have him in the 20 gallon now, which means I won't have to worry about putting him in a 20 gallon later.