I agree with rumblesushi for the most part. You need SOMETHING for the bacteria to feed on. This can be bread, fish waste, fish food, piss, bottled ammonia, whatever. Otherwise you just have water sitting in water. BTW...I have cycled an aquarium useing nothing except fish food, I added some when I started and then added a bit here and there later on.
first casualty...1 neon
- Thread starter Dead-N-Dreaming
- Start date
, id probably try to stay away from using that to start up the cycle. 
we'll see, if everything else survives then we didn't screw up too bad. it's not like we got some really expensive fish to start out with.
still workin out the bugs of having a bigger tank and didn't want to see a $40+ fish die in the first week. so we're sticking to a bunch of little inexpensive stuff so that we're more focused on problem solving and not only gettin pissed off because our expensive fish didn't make it. once we work out the kinks of keeping a 75 gallon tank and get used to the new filter then we'll look into what types of fish we want to get next. but for now a relatively inexpensive selection of community fish is enough for us to learn from and enjoy. also don't want to get fish that are aggressive...not sure how my 2 year old would react to seein one of her cute lil "shish" gettin eaten by daddy's big "shish". lol
thats what i overheard a clerk in a busy LFS say to a customer when he inquired about cycling a new tank he just bought i swear i almost busted a n..t laughing so hardsandtiger said:
FNH.
If you decide to get larger fish down the road bear in mind that many public schools and even lbraries maintain fish tanks and would love to have your excess community fish, little fish are easy to find homes for if you don't want to use them as feeders.
