I'm teaching you proper care of fish today and a little bit about the different types of fish. And now we're going to talk about the cycle process of the fish tank and how to set a fish tank up properly for the tank to be happy and healthy. The first process on a fish tank is the ammonia. The ammonia is fish waste and fish food that go into the tank and break down biologically to build up good bacteria to fight off the bad bacteria. If you don't run your tank through a cycle process, you're going to lose all your fish unfortunately. When you are doing the cycle process on your fish tank, start out with some good hardy fish such as serpae tetras, black skirt tetras, redeye tetras and head-and-taillight tetras. Those few fish are the fish that can withstand at a biological filtration cycle system. The fish that I have in this tank cannot withstand the cycle process, so please do not use the little bit less hardier fish such as these guys. The first step to do an ammonia test on your tank is to raise your lid, get your test tube which is included in the bottle display. There's a little white line on here that you can see, and this is what you're going to fill the water up to inside the test tube, out of the tank to do your water test such as what I'll demonstrate. I dip it into the tank, fill it up to the white line, set it down, and now the bottles, I'm going to get the bottle that is marked number 1 on it. Now on number 1, it has a little teardrop that has eight on it. And I'm going to add eight drops of this bottle into the test vial and put the cap on it and shake it a little bit. Now that I've got eight drops of this in there, we'll close the lid, grab the tube, put a top on it, and shake it a little bit to mix the chemicals together. We will take the top off, set it down, and grab the next bottle that has a number 2 on it, but also has a little teardrop with eight on it, and the eight means you add eight drops of this to the tube with bottle number 1. We'll put the top back on the bottle, set it aside, put the cap back on the test vial, shake it a little bit, and we need to let this sit about five minutes. And as you can tell it's yellow in color. If it stays yellow in color, this means it's good. If it goes from yellow to any other color, it means I have ammonia in the tank. Having ammonia in the tank can either mean in the first four to six weeks of cycle in the fish tank, your ammonia level is going to go up very high and is going to peak out and drop back down. During this time period, you do not
do water changes and do not add anymore to six to eight fish at a time because if you do more than that, then that's too many fish in the tank, and the tank can't handle really big fish load starting out. And don't put a lot of fish food in the tank because ammonia is caused from too much fish food as well. So, proper feeding, and monitoring of the fish food and not overcrowding your water--proper water conditions after your tank recycle will maintain a proper ammonia level in the tank.
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