Thank you for explaining this out thoroughly, this actually really really helped me wrap my brain around this and actually get it. It makes absolute sense that a soil that's full of nutrients is essentially fertilizer, which is poop. Not necessarily that this is poop, but if it's mimicking it then of course it could potentially mimic the other things poop does. I'm sure this is probably an obvious thing most get, but it just clicked for me. You have to understand I am very meticulous and a bit of a perfectionist with fish and take pride in being good at it. I've been told time and time again that I need to get into saltwater and coral due to how I am. HOWEVER, I can't even keep houseplants alive. Not even those "money tree." I think one time I may have overwatered lucky bamboo, which is impossible to do. I just "love" too much and have had a black thumb always, hence me coming here for advice. I hate taking advice blindly and just doing what others tell me so to actually get the reasoning behind something just helped tremendously.
I just spoke to my plant guy/co-worker about this, particularly this part and he told me he's kept his sensitive fish and shrimp with this stuff without an issue but wholeheartedly agreed with you that ADA soil is like what you're explaining. He told me that he grabbed Mr. Aqua over ADA for me based on the plants I'm planning to keep and I wouldn't require such an overly rich soil to maintain them. He told me that because of this particular soil not being SO rich, it wouldn't cause nearly as much of an ammonia spike as the ADA would which makes sense because ADA tells you to cycle for quite some time, while Mr. Aqua says it's safe to add fish after 12 hours.
Here comes the tricky part then:
Since this particular soil isn't as extreme, I think it wouldn't be too unreasonable to add to the established tank without it being as risky as other choices. The question is do I keep the morymrid/elephant nose in the tank and closely monitor it, or do I follow the instructions and remove them for 12 hours. I assume that the tank will require my sponge filter to stay with it so I would likely just keep the fish in a temporary hospital like tank until then. Would it suffice to keep them in said hospital tank with the heater and an airstone or should I pull out one of my cheap power filters I haven't been using. I'm assuming it'd be fine since people ship fish in worse and I'd still be supplying oxygen to them with the airstone. I just have to be creative with what I use for the hospital tank, but I have a bowfront 37 tall just laying around but my power filter won't fit unless I fill it completely up.
I think waiting the 12 hrs like instructions advise + daily w/c with close monitoring would probably be ok then.
I'm assuming uncapped means to leave this soil on top exposed. I want to avoid keeping the gravel on the surface because I did not have the intention of keeping the mormyrid with this substrate for much longer than a week. They need soft muddy bottoms or sand so they can nose around looking for worms. Gravel can be a bit rough for their delicate faces so I planned to add the soil where I want my HG runner and other plants and then adding some soft sand where I planned to keep it unplanted. I wanted to keep the gravel on bottom because obviously I don't want the morymrid dealing with it and wanted to add the soil over it so the excess waste in the gravel could supply extra nutrients and mimic a natural layer of sediment like it would in mother nature. I've seen this soil at work exposed or with no other layers at all and it's not quite as messy as some of the soils I've seen, but I could be totally wrong.
What are the pros and cons of having a soil capped so I could have an understanding of it's purposes
