Quote Originally Posted by maxQ View Post
I am fish less, there is a small amount of ammonia but where is that coming from with no fish? Should i put some fish in to help cycle?

I know my temp is too high, i don't know how to drop it, i have no heat or lights on now at its holding at 77 degrees and i have my AC on in my house. The Substrate feels very fine and soft like sand .****One of my big concerns is lighting, these are not common Clawed Frogs there are Albino's, I cant find much information on Albino's, will light be a factor for them, meaning will fluorescent hurt them.


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I'm not sure where the ammonia is coming from honestly. My best guess is something in the tank has to be decaying or your tap has some ammonia, possibly dead plant material with your live plants?

Either way the presence of ammonia is not a bad thing, you need it to start the cycle anyways. You could add fish flakes to start the cycling process.

WetWebMedia has some good articles about cycling an aquarium:
Establishing Biological Cycling in Freshwater Systems

Yeah, you could get a small fish and place it in there to cycle your aquarium as well. It's just this can be seen as kind of cruel, the fish will most likely suffer ill effects.. I can't say I have not cycled tanks with fish - i have - but now that I know more about proper aquarium keeping I think I would go with a fishless cycle. Another option is to 'jump start' the tank by using some of the filter media from an established tank, this actually works quite well and I've cycled tanks like this in the past for myself and friends.

As far as the lighting? Don't worry about the frogs being albino. I have an albino and two pigmented frogs and I use a pretty darn high powered LED fixture and I've never had any problems. The only precaution I take with lighting is rather than let the LED directly shine on the frogs I use a matte material from home depot under my lights to diffuse the light so it does not hurt their eyes when they bask.