The Puffer Forum

The snails will be great pufferfood but it will be difficult to cycle with ammonia in that tank then. You could use extra fish food.

I don't have any snails in there anymore. I want to just put dp's in there. I did take the bio wheel off of another established tank and put two plants from a established tank. I had that bio wheel in their before I even put the betta in.

All the bacteria you have in there at this point, can only support a betta now.

I'm getting rather confused about the timeline. What happened when?

You will only have enough bacteria alive to convert the existing waste. For example, if you put the biowheel and betta in 3 weeks ago then your bacteria colony will only be able to handle the waste that a betta would produce. All the rest will have died off. It's excellent to get media from another tank but if you do that you must immediately (i.e. not that instant but within hours would be safest) add an ammonia source as if you don't the bacteria will die off.

I did litteraly take those things out of my other tanks and put them rigght in. ok. so I will leave that betta in there for a few weeks and keep testing my levels. I just want to be very causious and not harm the dp's that I am going to purchase. In a few weeks should I maybe just buy one dp, and then a few weeks later the other two? Is that ok to do? I know sometimes it is not good to introduce fish at different times

The problem with that though is that like LGP stated, bettas produce a significantly smaller bioload than a puffer, even a DP. My puffers of a similar (if not smaller) size eat probably close to 4-5x as much as the betta. They're also messier eaters. The betta swallows his food whole but the puffers chew it up, spit it out, suck out the guts if they're bloodworms, etc. They're actually so messy with some things that we'll only feed certain foods immediately before a water change so we can vacuum out all the excess.

ok. you have persuaded me. Guess I will take the betta out and try the fishless cycle

Good job, it'll be worth it It really is the easiest way besides getting filter media from a fully stocked tank and adding the fish then.

Hurrah!

If you can find Tetra SafeStart or Dr Tim's One and Only, that works great to instantly cycle tanks (must add fish immediately or at least within a couple hours). I only use established media from my existing tanks coupled sometimes with the above products if they need a bit of a boost going to a larger tank or somesuch.