“Seeding” a new setup?

[Bryan]

I’ve seen a few comments which suggest that a couple of pieces of food (pellets or flakes) be dropped into a new tank to jumpstart the biological process. On some level that makes sense, but is it really a good idea?

[Vorteil]

IMHO just get the shrimp and add them in but most will wait which is great. There's very little waste produced by the shrimp to begin with. If you think about it you're starting with a clean tank with no filtration. There's nothing there to create the ammonia or nitrates so why not add the shrimp so they can help get the cycling going. The shrimp will come with water from an established tank which will help.

[Mustafa]

I would not use any food to start a conventional cycle. It will just backfire in most small tanks. The thing to keep in mind is that the biological activity of these shrimp is so small that the conventional "cycle" does not really apply. We do not need to go through an ammonia, nitrite, and then nitrate phase to complete a cycle. The amounts of these chemicals in Supershrimp tanks are so low that we can't even detect them with normal test kits available to us. And that is how it is supposed to be. A normal cycle with additional ammonia added to the tank in the form of pure ammonia or even food is going to produce lots of nitrate in the end and mess up the biological balance. There is always enough biological mass in a tank. Rocks and substrate cannot be cleaned 100%, i.e. they are not sterile, and even "dust" from outside the tank has organic components. And if you have plants, then there is always some part of it that decays and contributes to the bioload (even though active growth more than makes up for it later).

So, in my experience, adding food or anything else in the tank is not necessary and *can* be dangerous, especially in very small tanks. The "wait until you see algae" method works 100%. Yes, adding shrimp right away or week or two later can work just fine too, but people prepare their tanks in all kinds of different ways and with different substrates and decoration, so just waiting for algae growth eliminates the differences. It's just not worth the risk of ending up with dead shrimp by not being patient for a few weeks given that a Supershrimp tank will be in your possession for decades (or even longer in theory...passing it down to future generations).