New ammonia and nitrite

[Rymur4]

Hello everyone, I am very new to fish keeping and I recently cycled my 20 gallon tank about a week ago. on December 24th I added a few live plants and the next day my tests are showing 0.50 ammonia and 0.25 nitrite. I am wondering if me stirring up all the gravel and substrate in my tank caused the bacteria to go out of wack as my tank is now cloudy. If anyone has any ideas on what the cause could be that would be great!!

[PhillipHols]

Adding plants shouldn’t have upset the cycle, and I don’t believe that cloudy water from your substrate would be harmful either.  How long did it take to get your aquarium fully cycled?   Do you mind going over some of the cycling steps you took to get to this point?   Also for the record, have you added fish since cycling the tank? 

Edited December 26, 2020 by PhillipHols

[Rymur4]

Hello, For cycling I actually did a fish in cycle with my betta fish. It took about 1 month for my tank to cycle. The steps that I took was I added some of that bacteria in the bottle the brand that I used was API quickstart. That did not seem to work very well but I did see ammonia get up to about 1ppm then fall down to zero followed by nitrites which then fell down to zero. I would do 20% water changes every other day while it was cycling using Seachem prime to detoxify the ammonia and nitrite for my fish. 

[FrozenFins]

1 hour ago, Rymur4 said:

Hello, For cycling I actually did a fish in cycle with my betta fish. It took about 1 month for my tank to cycle. The steps that I took was I added some of that bacteria in the bottle the brand that I used was API quickstart. That did not seem to work very well but I did see ammonia get up to about 1ppm then fall down to zero followed by nitrites which then fell down to zero. I would do 20% water changes every other day while it was cycling using Seachem prime to detoxify the ammonia and nitrite for my fish. 

the best way to get rid of amonia and nitrite is to not use prime but do a quick small waterchange. As far as how it was caused, i dont know. It could be anything, or just a coincednce that you added live plants right before the amonia and nitrite went up a bit.

Also, just a quick side note. If you click "quote" right underneath the response to this response and others as well, and click "quote one post" at the bottom corner the person who wrote the response will be notified. Otherwise, they wont knoy you responded to them.

Edited December 26, 2020 by James Black

[Rymur4]

I will give that a try. I just think its strange that they both came back randomly it has only been like this for one day as I test daily so we will see how it is in a couple of days. Thank you!

[AudreyB]

So this just happened to me this week. I’m moving my betta into a larger 10 gallon tank because his 5 gallon spring a leak. The 5-gallon has been cycled for over a year and I’ve had 0 nitrates and 0 ammonia that entire time.  Luckily I could lower the water enough to stop the leak. So while my new tank is cycling I began moving plants from the leaking tank into the new tank. When I did this, I pulled out some vallisneria that was doing extremely well and had roots everywhere so when I pulled it up, a LOT of detritus stirred up with it. The next day the leaky tank had a major bacteria bloom. A day after that I noticed my betta was not behaving “normal” and tested the tank. Ammonia was present and it was >0.25. 
 

Im still dealing with the ammonia 3 days later, but my point is that I had the exact same problem you experienced when I stirred up my gravel. Somehow it affected my good bacteria. Didn’t know that could happen. 

[Brandy]

I suspect in both cases the detritus was not fully decomposed, and there was a lot of organic matter trapped in the gravel that was suddenly in the water column. This effectively becomes an overload situation. Your good bacteria is still there, it is just trying to catch up, as if you dumped 15 new fish in your tank at once. It will catch up, but in the mean time, you might want to use prime and water changes (both) to protect the resident fish.