No, you've done fine. Shrimp cycling is fine for fresh as well as salt. Leave the shrimp in the tank to fully dissolve. It'll turn into a floating mass of translucent goo that looks like a shrimp till you poke it. Very weird looking to see another liquid ripple underwater. Monitor your ammonia and watch for it to go down. Then do the same for the nitrite. A shrimp provides a MASSIVE blast of ammonia to the tank and will generate a large bacteria colony. After the ammonia and nitrite both peak and vanish completely, do a nearly complete water change and you'll be ready to stock whatever you want. btw, if this isn't a large volume tank, like a 55g or bigger, expect a serious stink from that shrimp. I did a 29g with shrimp once and my wife almost killed me lol
Oh and........
z71silverado98
"Male well it might be the SW practice, but rotting shrimp seems a little dangerous.
Id rather cycle w/ a few snails or a guppy or 2 "
Perhaps you aren't familiar with fishless cycling? Perhaps you should educate yourself on this more humane, more efficient method of cycling before you go around giving bad advice? Let me give you the basics of why his tank is better than your tank..
55g tank + 2 guppies = a tank cycled that is capable of supporting 2 guppies. Any thing beyond the 2 guppies is going to cause what is known as a "mini-cycle", and all that is, is the bacteria colony being overwhelmed and growing to consume the newly available food source (ammonia). Until the bacteria colonoy reproduces in suffucient numbers to consume the excess ammonia, you'll be doing water changes or scooping up dead fish.
55g tank + shrimp, or other fishless cycling that maintains obnoxiously high ammonia levels for any length of time = a tank that can support anything that produces up to that obnoxiously high level of ammonia. For example, your 2 guppies might produce enough ammonia to maintain a 2ppm level at all times, they dont, but for the sake of argument, let's assume they do. Now, once your cycle is complete, anything above that 2ppm is more than your tank can handle right away, so it'll be toxic to the fish in your tank. In the shrimp cycled tank, that probably maintained closer to 30-40 ppm during the cycle, you are going to be able to support a more dense population right away. Now, the other side of the hill is, if you cycle with shrimp, and maintain that 30-40ppm, then anything less than that level is going to starve your bacteria colony. So, if you throw a big fat Oscar in there, he's gonna maintain your 30-40ppm easily. But if you put one little baby Oscar in there, he might only put out 5ppm. So, the colony will begin to die off. Well, the bacteria doesn't really die, it just goes dormant.
Long story short, a strong cycle is a good cycle. So don't go hatin on methods you don't understand without first looking a little deeper..
People a lot smarter than you or I figured this stuff out, and it works beautifully.
