May be a dumb question about cycling?

[pacu mom]

Ill be adding my heaters in 6 weeks hopefully it will be cycled and I can start adding my fish to it a little at a time!

Are you fishless cycling your tank? If you fishless cycle your tank, and keep adding ammonia to 4 ppm, you will have a tremendous beneficial bacteria population when the cycling is done. When we fishless cycled our 300 gallon tank, after cycling, we moved our fish over to the new tank knowing that the filtration system could more than handle the bio load of our fish. If you fishless cycle and then add a few fish at a time, there will be a die off of beneficial bacteria as there would not be enough bio load to support the BB. Then every time you add a fish there would be a mini cycle as the BB build up again.

The beauty of fishless cycling is that you colonize more than enough BB to handle the bioload of any tank (unless you are severely overstocked).

 

[CharlieTuna]

No need to heat your tanks while cycling. I cycled my 110g with the heaters off.

 

[oddballfish]

I might put a few guppies in or hardy fish to cycle it my leapord leaf will eat them anyway lol.

 

[creepyoldguy]

In this case, I will have to agree with everyone else on this one. Although bacteria grow faster/ slower and die off at certain temps, I don't think there is much different between the 60-80 degree marks. It would be interesting to see if there is any definitive evidence if temp speeds up or slows down the process.