What Kind for 1st Fish?

My tank has been going for about 3 days now with dry rock and live sand. It's a 29 gallon. What would be a good fish to get to start off my cycle?

 

no need to get a fish to start the cycle - get a raw piece of shrimp and toss it in the tank and let the cycle come on that way. Nothing worse than getting a fish to cycle and then needing to catch the little guy later on when you decide you dont want it anymore.

 

Dont cycle it with a fish, get a piece of frozen shrimp. You would just kill the fish.

 

For those that use a fish, most use damsels. They are pretty hardy, but they are ounce for ounce one of the meanest fish. And they are very hard to catch if you decide you don't want to keep it.

The advice above, using a raw shrimp, is the most humane way to do it.

I have a friend locally that has all damsels in his tank and it is beautiful. Just not for what I had in mind for my community tank.

 

I for one have no issues with cycling with a live fish (as long as it's an abundant not threatened fish).

Damsels (like a blue or a blue with yellow tail) (including clowns) generally survive cycles. So you'll either be stuck with an aggressive fish (good odds of that anyway) or you'll have to remove it later as mentioned.

Chromi's (from what I hear) usually survive but often do not.


Either of those would be fine. There are studies that seem to indicate a fish registers pain as pain and would find ammonia (from the cycle) painful. But I'm not here to lecture you on your own ethics.

It is absolutely true that you do not need a live fish. You can do it with raw shrimp. But even better yet, you can do it with nothing. It will still cycle. The idea of "kick starting" a cycle isn't a given that it's needed...

So you could just leave it as is and it will cycle.


BTW - did you get the live sand from an established tank or from a bag on a shelf?

If you got it from a tank - great! You have live sand. Your cycle will start on its own.

If you got it from a bag off a shelf - you got taken. Live sand lives in the water, not in a bag on a shelf in a dry store... So you have sand with a bunch of dead stuff in it. But yay, that works all the better for kick starting a cycle...


So in the end, you don't need to add anything to get your cycle going. But you can if you want to...

 

+1 on not cycling with a fish, I feel that it's inhumane. Everyone has different levels of sensitivity to this though. Regardless if the fish survives it's still putting it through an ammonia bath basically (yeah that may be exaggerated).

Raw shrimp works perfectly fine and present no such ethical dilemmas!

 

I used a damsel. They are tough as they are nasty as they are fast, as they are crafty-hiders.

I had a 3 striped from the very begining and he got along with the others until one day I had to take him out cause I saw him acting stupid. I ended up ripping up my entire tank, had to take out EVERYTHING cause he gave that much trouble.

What a mess.

 

i completely disagree with using fish to cycle because they are "an abundant not threatened fish"

this is the behaviour that makes us humans the most destructive animal
on this planet.

use a piece of table shrimp, the kind we eat. that will kick the cycle off.

 

I just threw in a piece of raw gulf shrip, about a third of the shrimp. I don't want a damsel in my tank, I have one in my ten gallon that I started it with over three years ago. 1+ on the shrimp idea, thanks.