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A “mature aquarium”  (sometimes called a “seasoned aquarium” or a “balanced aquarium”) is an aquarium with a lot of diversity in the brown gunk in its filter, tank, and substrate.

Cycling Test: A series of tests were run in buckets to see what feeding regimes produced the fastest cycles. The second series of tests were run in the buckets to see what water parameters give the best cycling times.

There are several general types of beneficial bacteria involved in oxidizing ammonia to relatively safe nitrate in the freshwater aquarium. Scientists call these organisms “nitrifying” bacteria and archaea. We will use the term “beneficial bacteria”

An understanding of the nitrogen cycle is NOT REQUIRED to have a good aquarium. This idea that every hobbyist needs to understand the nitrogen cycle is a myth promulgated by well meaning but ill-informed individuals on social media.

Inoculate for Cycling. To jumpstart the cycling of an aquarium, you can inoculate the aquarium with “seeding” material.

There are a whole series of products that claim to “detoxify” ammonia and nitrite during cycling. They claim these products give an “instant cycle”. These claims are simply false marketing hype.

Understand, I recommend fish-less cycling for all aquarium hobbyists setting up a tank. This is simply the best way to cycle an aquarium with the least risk to the fish. But contrary to many fervent people on social media, one does not HAVE to formally cycle a tank

If one has fish in the aquarium during cycling the tank, this is called “fish-in cycling”. I don’t recommend fish-in cycling. There is simply no reason to do it.

There are a huge number of beginner hobbyists that have Googled aquarium cycling and come up with ammonia as being the perfect feed for fishless (no fish in the tank) cycling. Most experienced hobbyists, including the author, don’t do cycling with ONLY ammonia!

There are very many ways to cycle an aquarium and they all seem to work well. But being an obsessive-compulsive chemist nerd, I’ve come up with what I feel gives the fastest possible cycling time where the tank is capable of handling a large load of fish when the cycle is done.