Starting the Cycle

The LFS told me to use a frozen shrimp to start cycling my tank. It has been two days and Ammonia is between .25 and .5. The shrimp has a opaque jelly surrounding the whole thing, the shrimp looks like it is in a bubble of jelly. What is the jelly stuff surrounding it??? Is that was the bacteria looks like??

 

lol, sound pretty funny to me that they would suggest that but w/e ... I would have went with the good old thing of seeding the tank, starting the cycle with live sand or rock and letting it sit at least a month before introducing anything to it. My first tank I did I bought none live sand, and some cured rock. Let it go for about 1 week then introduced some live rock made sure to have the same amount live as cured. Then let that go for 3weeks. Then I wanted to see if stuff would start to live in it so I went and got some fresh water mollies. I bought the feeder ones as they were only 12c a piece got about 24 of them or something like that. Let the system go for about another 2 weeks. I removed them gave them to the lfs and put coral beauty in there to start eating some of the hair algea and other algeas, and bought a royal gramma. They went good for 2weeks then I got some colt reef and a free piece of xenia. They went good. I just suggest go slow and read about what to do, some store may tell you to do things that are odd just go with the thing that most people do and perfer.

 

I've done the dead shrimp for a cycle a couple of times. It should work just fine. The "jelly" forming around the shrimp is just decomposing organics.
You actually won't need a big peice opf shrimp, about 1/3 of a dinner shrimp is plenty...

GL!

Scoffer