Reptile & Amphibian Forums

So just to update on my previous post... My water is clear now.. jsut happend today. I dont know how. Crystal clear it is. My eel ate today at last. My Lion is finaly eating thawed instead of live...everything seems great... But when I tested my water .. I only did hte NITRITE because that was my biggest problem before and I already know if its high than the other levels are screwed up. Well, it was so high that it didnt even match any of the colors on the chart. It came out a very see through yellow color with a slight brown to it? I dunno what that is supposed to be. My chart only reads to 5.0 Either way... I dunno why the nitrite is so high... the tank is CLEAN. the water is CLEAR....so why?
I guess it could be dueto the idea I had of it recylcing.. I still dont understand why it would do that...or how long this is going ot take.. I just dont want to lose any fish. Any ideas on otehr things I can do to both ESTABLISH and KEEP my biological filtration? So it doesnt recylce again? I have a huge canister filter with teh bio sponge in it and now I also added some Ehiem Substrat Pro...which may be what cleared the water up... But I dont know what else I can use to keep the bacteria needed in without risking kiling it off again..however I managed to do that.. the weird thing about it is I have ALL live sand... So how the heck could it have ...died? grrrr, just too frusterating

At mt LFS they have packets of guck that jump start the biological filtration. they run about $15.

If it's refrigerated that would be Bio-Spira