Cycling my new tank

[Anaspidea]

Hello all!

Although i am brand new to this forum i am not as new to saltwater aquariums.

I owned a 75 gallon tank for 6 years that i recently had to give away because i did not have the ability to move it across the country with me. I did however move my empty 30gal with me.

I am in the process of setting it up and have to admit i don't really know when it is safe to begin adding corals and other life. It has been so long and my old tank was established so it didn't require as much thought.

At this point i have already introduced live sand and live rock. It has been 3 weeks since I've done this and i have not seen any drastic changes or signs of cycling. I added a damsel about a week ago to try to get things in motion.

Id also like to add that i had quite a few hitchhikers on/in the live rock. I have lots of starfish and serpent stars, quite a few copepods, 1 large snail (not sure how they didn't notice that guy), at least 3 stomatella snails and the rocks are almost entirely purple with coralline algae.

is it possible that it cycled and i just didn't see anything? I know well that this is all about patience and i would hate to start adding things too soon and have a die-off.

I just tested my water and these are my readings:
pH- 8.2
Ammonia- 0ppm
Nitrate- 0ppm
Nitrite- 15.0ppm

Thank you so much and any input would be appreciated!

-Anaspidea

[thegrun]

It sounds like the tank has cycled, did you ever see an ammonia spike? If not I would continue to feed the damsel for at least two more weeks, testing every other day for ammonia. If during those two weeks you never see a sign of ammonia when you can safely start to slowly add livestock.