# plant removal cause mini cycle?



## pyrrolin (Jan 11, 2012)

A few days ago I removed over half of the plants in my 90 gallon, it was a jungle in there. I picked off over 40 bleheri sword baby plants from the main plant and ended up removing over half the leaves of the main plant because they were damaged and taking up too much space. Removed over half a dozen vals and 3 other plants that I didn't like anymore.

Could this huge change in the number of plants cause a mini cycle? I ended up losing a few fish. First I saw my really old yoyo dead and figured it was probably just old age then I found a gourami dead and did a quick test and found some ammonia and nitrites. I was not feeling well so I put it off for a couple hours while I laid in bed for a bit and when I came back down, my fully mature festivum was dead, I called him my buddy, he would take snails from my hand and nip my hand if I put it in without a snail.

A couple weeks ago I was long over due for cleaning the canister filter. I ended up cleaning all the sponges. I have lots of bio media in the filter but the sponges seem to end up growing a lot of BB that seem to eat up the ammonia and nitrites before they get to the bio media leaving the bio media with less BB, that is my theory anyways. I even seeded a bit and added stress zyme after doing the filter cleaning. And a while after this filter cleaning I lost a younger bala shark and a huge tiger barb.

So after two separate mini cycles lately, and I have had problems in the past to, I tossed on an AC110 to go with the rena xp3. I hope this stops these fish killing mini cycles.

Is it that I wait so long between cleaning the canister filter or what? I'm guessing that if I cleaned it more often, I wouldn't have to clean the sponges in the sink killing all the BB in them.

Another idea is switching the order of my media, put the bio media first then sponges. I will have to rinse off the bio media ever cleaning with used tank water but it might make it so there is more BB in the bio media than the sponges as it should be.

Any thoughts on any of these things?


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## TorontoBoy (Mar 14, 2013)

Sorry about the large loss of your fish.

I'm not sure, but why are you cleaning your sponges in tap water? I always use dirty tank water, safe for BB.

Having your sponges before your biomedia reduces the clogging of the biomedia, which is harder to clean than sponges. I'd leave it in sponge then biomedia order.


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## bob123 (Dec 31, 2009)

Just a thought, when you pulled up the plants could you have caused a release of gases from the substrate which may have been ammonia or nitrites or some other material that was harmful to the fish. Sorry to hear about the loss of fish.


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## Rigio (Jul 23, 2013)

bob123 said:


> Just a thought, when you pulled up the plants could you have caused a release of gases from the substrate which may have been ammonia or nitrites or some other material that was harmful to the fish. Sorry to hear about the loss of fish.


To bob's point, do you have gravel or sand? If you have sand it's really common for gas pockets to develop, to combat this you can get MTS to aerate the sand when they burrow.

Also, washing filter media in tap water is sure to devastate your BB colony. The BB will not stand a chance against chlorine. Best to use either declorinated tap water or reuse the water you take out from a water change to rinse the media.


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

Did you see bubbles coming up from the substrate when you pulled the plants ? If there were many of them you might have noticed an odour, kind of swampy smell.

Bubbles would indicate some 'swamp gas' buildup under the substrate. It is quite toxic in itself and may kill some fish, and will certainly kill shrimp, if they are exposed as the bubbles rise up. But it is soon released into the air at the surface.

If there is a lot of it, it can make the whole tank smell swampy. If so, best to stir up the substrate to release any other gas pockets, then do some big WCs. The gas contains sulphur compounds and probably methane as well, as it is caused by anaerobic bacterial decomposition.

Allowing a filter to get very dirty can turn it into a sort of nitrate factory that puts out far more nitrate than your plants will be able to use, and more than is dealt with by the usual WCs. So that might be one part of the problem with mini cycles, possibly.

When you do clean a filter, if it has more than one sponge as well as other biomedia and if it's the only filter you have running, then clean only one sponge or other type of media at one time. That way you don't lose so much BB at one time. Do each layer of media at different times.

And as has been said, you should never rinse any media in plain tap water. Use either the water from WCs that you've removed from the tank, or else put a bit of dechlorinator in tap water and use that. That way chlorine won't kill the BB. You do lose some number of them when you rinse, but not as many as you may think. They are sticky, anchored to the surface they are growing on. So if you don't poison them with chlorine, that will also help prevent mini cycles.

I can't say whether whether it is the sponges or other biomedia that hold more BB, but it is the amount of surface area that governs how many BB are on a given piece of media. The more surface area, the more BB it can support. Depends how much media, what kind it is, as to how much surface area it has. 

Just don't clean more than one type of media or more than one sponge at one time, and you should avoid more mini cycles. And don't wait too long to clean, and that helps keep nitrates down as well.

Simply removing plants would not cause a mini cycle. They don't have a significant amount of BB on them, not enough to make any real difference to the processing of ammonia from the fish. But reducing the number of plants by a large amount would greatly reduce nitrate uptake once they are removed. If nitrates get too high, over 50 ppm, they're toxic.


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## BillD (Jun 5, 2006)

Some good points made here. Sponges should definitely be before bio media, even though sponges are bio media. If the sponges get clogged, you will lose some of the BB because of lack of oxygen, and the BB compete with the heterotrophic bacteria that consume the solids for available oxygen, In reality, and properly working filter is a "nitrate factory". Having said all that, it is hard to imagine the loss of the bacteria in the sponges, even assuming all of them were gone, that it would be that bad. I always clean all elements of a filter at the same time, in tank water and have never had any issues. As mentioned, the BB are firmly attached to the media and not easily removed, so vigorously cleaning the foam elements should not cause any problems, assuming you killed half of the BB it should be back in 8 hours assuming sufficient food for them.


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## pyrrolin (Jan 11, 2012)

I use tap water because I wait so long to clean the filter that they are so gummed up with junk I don't have much choice, need to do it more often.

Substrate is potting soil and then sand blasting sand on top of it, didn't notice bubbles, but that is possible and sounds quite reasonable.


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## Mlevi (Jan 28, 2012)

pyrrolin said:


> I use tap water because I wait so long to clean the filter that they are so gummed up with junk I don't have much choice, need to do it more often.


When i do my canister filter, i do a 20% or so water change, and then use that water to clean the media. Using tap water (chlorinated water) is sure to kill the bacteria on the media in your filter, and it can trigger a cycle coz now all at once, the equilibrium in your tank is lost. On the flip side, I don't clean my canister filter unless absolutely necessary...maybe once every 3-4 months, but everyone's mileage varies on the frequency. "cleaning" the filter has more to do with the ability of the water to flow through the media rather than how "dirty" the media has become, so I wait until the flow is sluggish before i clean it, and I don't want it "clean" to the point where all the BB is lost, so mine never looks pristine.

I'm learning as I go, but the above seems to work for my setup.

Al.


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## coldmantis (Apr 5, 2010)

Be careful with removing plants and potting soil, this time you got a mini cycle next time you might get dead fish and fart smell

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 4


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

'fart smell'.. well, that's one way to describe swamp gas I guess. Such a refined term there Coldmantis .

It's possible that a soil with a cap style tank might get more gas pockets, being denser and less likely to be disturbed unless plants are removed from it. So in that case, even thought the plants don't themselves cause a cycle, the byproducts under the cap that are released by uprooting might, I suppose. I've never done a dirt tank, so I have no personal experience with it.

But if you don't have enough tank water to clean filter media, just add a few drops of dechlorinator to the container of tap you are using to clean the media and swish it round, and then you can clean them safely, not kill more with chlorine.

And truly, just vigorous squeezing of sponges or vigorous swishing/shaking of ceramic media will do all that's needed. It is more a question of keeping good flow than of what your Mom might have considered a thorough cleaning. If they are extremely filthy, I had sometimes done two small buckets with dechlor' water, using one to squeeze out the worst of the mess, the second to get rid of the extremely dirty water still remaining after the first container. I use Prime, so I need very little for the container of rinse water.

I wish I had even a little experience with canister filters, I gather they are a different sort of critter than my AC HOBs, but all I do with any filter media from them is swish/shake/squeeze, in tank or dechlor water. I water plants with the resulting black water unless I use it to seed a new filter. If I do use it to seed a filter, that filter will soon need rinsing simply because I've added a lot of the clogging sediment to it in one big dose. But it still jump starts a filter well, and with the addition of just a small amount of used media, good to go in a day or two.

BillD, I know filters are meant to produce nitrate as the end result, so, yeah, they are nitrate factories when you think of it. I only meant that sometimes they seem to produce far more nitrate than can be used easily by the plants, and it can get to toxic levels if WCs are not done frequently enough to control them. 

With my AC 70s, I find that allowing them to get to the point they are really clogged up appears to increase nitrate levels more than usual, which is why I used that term, nitrate factory. When an AC is sending water back into the tank not only over the right side weir, but also squeezing around the uptake tube side and back to the tank that way also, it is seriously clogged.


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## pyrrolin (Jan 11, 2012)

Yeah, I need to clean it more than once every few months so it doesn't take so much to get the sponges clean and make sure I use safe water. Because I always wait so long, the sponges are totally caked in crap, that is my main problem, one squeeze and a bucket of water would be totally messed up and I would need about 5 buckets for each of the 4 sponges.

Canister filters are basically the same as doing an ac filter. Normal parts are sponge and bio media, some have extra part that is basically filter floss. You just turn it off, move a lever to stop the flow, take off the top that is the pump part and bring the canister to your work area and clean sponges and bio media if needed and clean out the filter floss. Just don't wait a few months like I do. My rena filter is easier because it has different trays, my ehiem is just one big area and you have to scoop out the bio media by hand to get to the part under it, not fun.

I think everyone is right about the pockets coming up when I removed plants. If I ever have to remove that many plants again I will do a large wc right after.


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