cycling
 

Hello , I have a simple dilemma. I cooked some LR for a few weeks and believe I may have killed it. After adding live sand, the rock and RO SW. All my readings are zero. No spike. What should I be adding to start a proper cycling process. Thank you.

Add a raw shrimp or some pure ammonium cloride (from your LFS...not grocery store). Either that or add a hardy fish like a damsel.....his waste will be an ammonia source, but its not the most humane method. Make sure you do some research on cycling to ensure that you know what to look for.

I have successfully cycled my BC so am familiar with the process. Is it possible my rock cycled during curing?

1. live rock comes pre-cycled. That's the 'live' part. A true cycle is the establishment of the bacterial bed where there wasn't one before in response to a supply of nitrogenous waste. Live rock comes with that bacterial bed already established. The reason people cure it before hand is because a bunch of stuff on the rock can die in transit (sponges, worms, some bacteria, crabs, etc.) and when it starts to decay it creates more ammonia than the pre-existing bacteria on that piece of rock can process all at once.

2. If you have no source of ammonia, you have no cycle. If your rock didn't have much die off, or if there wasn't much on it to die in the first place, there won't have been much of a cycle.

3. If your rock was in a holding tank at an LFS for any amount of time, it was probably pre-cured, with minimal die-off between the LFS and your house. So you're not going to see any sort of a spike now. If you put fully cured live rock in to a brand new tank, you very well might never see a cycle, or what cycle you do see will be hard to detect.

Johnny no one, even LFS that sell marine fish would recommend using a live damsel to cycle a tank anymore. It is simply no longer acceptable. Although the fish may survive, reefers don't see the necessity of putting a fish through the stress of a cycle when a dead shrimp as you have suggested will do the trick.