Technically speaking the best way to cycle any tank for fish and shrimp is indeed to do a fish-less cycle (nothing living in the tank during this process) with ammonia, when your beneficial bacteria has colonised and can convert waste and anything else that creates ammonia into nitrites and then into nitrates then the tank is 100% safe and perfect for living creatures. The nitrates will be sucked up and used by the algae that you do want to grow in the tank and in turn the shrimp will feed from the algae. The reason you can 'get away' just letting the tank sit for for a month or two and wait for the algae to grow before adding the shrimp without adding an ammonia source to cycle it is in theory if your tank is a few months old and you have algae growing, any ammonia the shrimps waste creates will cycle the tank, this *should* be completed before the levels get too toxic for the shrimp and the nitrates are so low from the cycle the algae takes care of it, hence no water changes needed if all that is in place.
google.com wont discuss cycling methods or advise you to carry out water testing to check if your water is healthy because that means water changes if tank readings are bad (ammonia, nitrites, nitrates etc). This goes against their whole sales pitch of how low maintenance and simple it apparently is to give the shrimp a healthy environment, as unfair as it is the Opae ula shrimp appears to be very hardy and google seem to ride off the back of that. The forum owner fell out with me for suggesting to a user there to do a water change when he had issues with his tank, he deleted a lot of my posts/advice that suggested testing the water quality and doing a partial water change to reduce the amount of ammonia in the tank then went on to remove my account access while leaving some of my posts that didn't go against his opinion for the sole reason to make it look like I was still there and still a member as if nothing had happened! My accounts not banned but he revoked access so I cant log in, this is because he'd look bad banning me for suggesting water changes, this is why i setup my own forum. I wouldn't post there again if you paid me, he was very rude.
Last edited by odin on 12 Jan 2017 22:06, edited 3 times in total.
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