Beneficial bacteria, lets call it BB, help to convert ammonia to nitrites, and nitrites to nitrates, which are less toxic than the previous one. Fish produced ammonia in their pee, and rather than converting it to something else like most land animals do, they simply excrete it out. Ammonia is toxic to fishes. Anything that decomposes would also create ammonia, be it fish poo, uneaten food etc. Cycling a tank would allow a tank to grow these BB, so that you can convert the ammonia to the less toxic nitrate. There's a lot of technical jargon here and there but I won't be elaborating. BB attaches to surfaces. So any surface in the tank will be able to support BB. Be it gravel, the tank walls, filter media etc. Every surface has BB on it in an aquarium. To cycle a tank, you need a source of ammonia, and for the filter to be running, etc etc. Basically more or less the same thing as when you're running the tank. The more mainstream method now would be fishless cycling, or the using of fish food/other things that decompose.
You need an ammonia test kit and nitrite test kit to know whether your cycle is complete. You'll see a spike in ammonia, then a spike in nitrite, then both should reach zero. THIS IS IMPORTANT.
You can speed up that cycling process by adding some filter media from an old filter that is in use. That's called seeding. Still, this takes about 2-3 weeks, not a few days.
An aquarium filter is a piece of equipment that is used for several purposes. A biological filter is a filter that is used to provide extra surface area for the BB to grow on.
Bookmarks