Live bacteria in new tank

[crashnburn55]

If I add a commercial product of live bacteria (like Fritz zyme 7) into a tank to "jump start" the ammonia cycling process in a freshwater, lightly planted 60 gallon tank but am not able to add fish for a week or more, should I be adding something into the tank, like fish food (or something else) to keep the bacteria alive until I add fish?  How often should I be adding the substance into the tank until the fish get added?  Thanks for your thoughts in advance!

[Daniel]

6 hours ago, crashnburn55 said:

If I add a commercial product of live bacteria (like Fritz zyme 7) into a tank to "jump start" the ammonia cycling process in a freshwater, lightly planted 60 gallon tank but am not able to add fish for a week or more, should I be adding something into the tank, like fish food (or something else) to keep the bacteria alive until I add fish?

Probably, but who really knows, growing bacteria is a black art.

But, they gotta eat something.

I used to be skeptical of adding beneficial bacteria to an aquarium because the beneficial bacteria are always there anyway whether we add them or not. I think @KBOzzie59 suggested they can even come in to a new aquarium on our hands.

But, overtime I am slowly being convinced that these commercial products might not be complete snake oil.

The bacteria that process nitrogen in our aquariums are thought to be Nitraspina, Nitrospinacacae, and Nitrospria. These little guys have a disadvantage because they are autotrophs and their only food source is nitrogen. The problem is that there are also lot of heterotrophic bacteria that consume a wide variety of complex organic substances. And, the heterotophs can double their populations every 4 hours, whereas our poor little autotrophic beneficial bacteria double their populations only every 24 to 30 hours.

So to give the beneficial bacteria a leg up, we add them on day one and feed them some source of nitrogen (typically ammonia, which can come from uneaten food) and hope they get established before they can be out-competed by their less picky and faster multiplying cousins.

[crashnburn55]

Awesome take and thank you so much for the information.  Learning more about fish care everyday!

 

Follow up questions:  To feed the beneficial bacteria, should I just add fish food and let it decompose to get ammonia to the beneficial bacteria?  Or should I buy something like Dr. Tim's Aquatic's Ammonium Chloride Aquarium Treatment as the ammonia source? 

 

Any thoughts on how often I should dose the fish food or ammonium chloride until fish are added?

[Daniel]

4 hours ago, crashnburn55 said:

Follow up questions:  To feed the beneficial bacteria, should I just add fish food and let it decompose to get ammonia to the beneficial bacteria?  Or should I buy something like Dr. Tim's Aquatic's Ammonium Chloride Aquarium Treatment as the ammonia source?

Any thoughts on how often I should dose the fish food or ammonium chloride until fish are added?

I have never done either so I don't know. But since I don't know the answer and easy out would to try the Dr. Tim's because at least that would have some sort of instructions and then it wouldn't all be guess work.

[crashnburn55]

That is true.  Makes sense.  Thanks for the honest appraisal and feedback!  Will give it a go.