Khuli Loaches died. Why?

[wildroseofky]

I posted this on the unhealthy fish board but have gotten no input into anything but my CO2 and PH. The conversation has somehow gotten off topic. Could someone please read through my post and see if they can help me figure out why they died so I can correct the situation before trying again.http://www.aquariumadvice.com/forums/f17/loach-may-have-ich-257219.html

They were fine in QT but when I added them to my main tank, they were all dead within a few days. Their color faded and they stayed at the top of my tank in the moss tree that I have. That is where I found them all dead. When I removed them from my tank their gills were blood red. All my other fish are fine. I even found a baby ghost shrimp that survived its larval stage and is a very tiny shrimp now. Something I was told almost never happens. My PH has been getting low from my CO2. Could the swings in PH have killed them? I am also dealing with a cyno bacteria outbreak. I have ordered erythromycin to take care of that. nothing else has worked. Could that have killed them? I have 2 adult mollies and 2 one month old fry, 3 nerite snails, and now 8 ghost shrimp. One a baby. All are doing find. Ammonia reading stays at 0, nitrite 0, I have been having trouble with nitrate jumping up to 80. I have been keeping a close eye on it and doing massive water changes when it goes up. Could that have killed them? I feel so bad because they died. I want to get more but think I am going to wait for a few months before getting
any. I want to figure out what happened with this batch. I hope someone can help me.

 

[my_little_tetra]

Sorry, I'm new at all of this, so take my post with a big old grain of salt...

I recently had some fish die because of high nitrate levels...mine were around 80. I found out I wasn't doing PWCs frequently enough. I guess 80 is def high enough to kill. Doing some reading after this happened to me, I found out that causes for high nitrates are: not doing PWCs frequently enough, overfeeding, and overstocking. I drastically upped the frequency of my water changes and I've cut back on how much I'm feeding too. So far, my trates have been running at about 5.

Also, I've heard that swings in pH can kill, so if you are having issues with that, maybe? Or maybe if your params in your QT and the tank you added them to were different? Maybe that's why they died and the other fish didn't, b/c they are used to the params in their tank but it shocked the new fishs' systems?

 

[armymp327]

I posted this on the unhealthy fish board but have gotten no input into anything but my CO2 and PH. The conversation has somehow gotten off topic. Could someone please read through my post and see if they can help me figure out why they died so I can correct the situation before trying again.http://www.aquariumadvice.com/forums/f17/loach-may-have-ich-257219.html

They were fine in QT but when I added them to my main tank, they were all dead within a few days. Their color faded and they stayed at the top of my tank in the moss tree that I have. That is where I found them all dead. When I removed them from my tank their gills were blood red. All my other fish are fine. I even found a baby ghost shrimp that survived its larval stage and is a very tiny shrimp now. Something I was told almost never happens. My PH has been getting low from my CO2. Could the swings in PH have killed them? I am also dealing with a cyno bacteria outbreak. I have ordered erythromycin to take care of that. nothing else has worked. Could that have killed them? I have 2 adult mollies and 2 one month old fry, 3 nerite snails, and now 8 ghost shrimp. One a baby. All are doing find. Ammonia reading stays at 0, nitrite 0, I have been having trouble with nitrate jumping up to 80. I have been keeping a close eye on it and doing massive water changes when it goes up. Could that have killed them? I feel so bad because they died. I want to get more but think I am going to wait for a few months before getting
any. I want to figure out what happened with this batch. I hope someone can help me.

what type of substrate do you have? kulli loaches need a soft sandy substrate because they need to be able to borrow, if you dont have this chances are they will die off.

 

[Cynic]

How did you acclimatize them from the QT tank to the actual tank?

 

[Cactuspixie]

what type of substrate do you have? kulli loaches need a soft sandy substrate because they need to be able to borrow, if you dont have this chances are they will die off.

Sand is better, but my kuhlis have been in 3mm gravel for more than a year. You have to really keep the substrate clean though.

 

[wildroseofky]

I do twice weekly sometimes more water changes. I check my water almost every day. I have gotten busy and went two days a few times before checking it. I opened up my glass lid so get more air movement and lowered my water level a little to try and get rid of the cyno. I remove waste several times a week. Mollies poop a lot. Plus I am guilty of sometimes over feeding. I am cutting way back on that. I have 3 inches of pool filter sand substrate. I use a long plastic rod to move it around several times a week to get rid of gas pockets.
I acclimated over a period of three hours. I checked the QT tank water perimeters and compared it to my main tank. The only thing different was the PH was 7.6 in the Qt tank, it was 7.2 in main tank. Ammo 0, Nitrite 0, and Nitrate 20 in both tanks. Temp was 2 degrees off. I took water from QT tank and put it in a plastic breeder box thing, moved the loaches into that, and floated it in the main tank. I turned off the lights. I waited 15 minutes to allow the water to start equalizing in temp. I took a small turkey baster thing and removed one squirt of water from fry tank and added the same amount back from the main tank. I did that every 15 minutes. After about 2 hours of doing that, I tilted the box so that one end was in the water and let the loaches enter the main tank. My Dalmation Molly promptly chased one down and tried to eat it. I sacred her away from them and watched until the loaches moved to a hiding spot. The next day I couldn't find any of the loaches. That night when the lights went out, two came out and swam around the tank. After a couple of days I started looking for the other two but couldn't find them. I assumed they were in the sand. Next day I was doing a partial cleaning of the substrate an I found two in the moss tree. They were fading in color and falling over on their sides. I couldn't find anything wrong with them, they just looked sick. They died by that evening, then the next day another one. On the fourth day I found the last one dead. All in the moss tree. I have a large molly is a bully. She just bullied her tank mate, another female gold doubloon molly to death. It just has fry and the other molly kept chasing her and wouldn't let her eat. She kept hiding and I was putting food behind things for her. The big molly would ram into her and chase her until she ran into something. She burst her swim bladder and I had to euthanize her. I waited two days but she just got worse and worse so I put her out of her misery. I hated to loose her too after the other loses.

I am wondering if the Dalmatian molly didn't bully the loaches. She tries to bite me when I put my hand in the tank and will attack the vacuum or anything else in the tank. All except the two smaller fry. The smallest fry actually tries to bully her and the other bigger fry. It is her offspring. She leaves the ghost shrimp and nerite snails alone.

I am thinking about getting another aquarium and putting her and the mean fry in it and starting over with new fish. Good idea?

 

[Mebbid]

The only thing that I could think of that would be causing you problems is the PH swings you have been going through. If im not mistaken you have T8 lighting in your aquarium. From my understanding that isn't going to give you much light for your plants to utilize the CO2 you are adding to your system. On top of that the large number of water changes could potentially be causing you to go through ph swings which could potentially shock your fish.

How much light do you have?
How much water are you changing each time?
Do you test your pH n the morning before turning on the lights?

As for the cyano bacteria if you use erythromycin it will kill the BB in your tank and with the issues you are currently having with your nitrate swings, you might want to either wait it out or keep the fish in a separate tank with a cycled filter while you use the antibiotic. Then you can bring the fish back into the main tank and use the backup filter to start the BB process on the new tank.

Also, nitrate swings are generally started by an ammonia spike. You could potentially be getting swings in ammonia that you are missing when you do your ammonia test.

 

[wildroseofky]

I, too, am beginning to wonder if the frequent water changes aren't hurting. On Sunday I do a 50% water change and move all decorations and clean. During the week it is usually like a 10 gallon change on a 29 gallon tank. More if Nitrite spikes. My first nitrite spike was caused by crap getting blown under all the hiding places I put in my tank. I also have a couple of shrimp who think their job is to grab everything up and hide it. LOL. After that I started checking under hiding places frequently and cleaning them out. Problem solved I thought. Last week after adding the Loaches I checked and my nitrate had jumped to 40-80. The red color is hard for me to distinguish between. No ammonia or nitrite showed up. I did a 60% or better water change and got it down to 20. Everything I have read says that more water changes are better but I am beginning to rethink that. I use Prime to treat the water.

My lighting is three 8 1/2 inch metal dome clamp lights with 20 watt, 6500k spiral fluorescent bulbs. The are hung 6 inches above the light. I started out with them on top of the tank but got tired of having to move them every time I needed to work inside the tank. I worked out a pull system so I can just untie a rope and raise or lower them as needed. On top of the tank they were stressing the fish. The fish stayed under the tree while they were on. I have red ludwigia that was not red untill I added these lights. Now it is coloring nicely. I have 2 amazon swords I just added. Money wort which is growing nicely. My penny wort has finally started to take off. My Christmas moss has tripled in size or more despite being moved from one tank to another and constantly being picked at by the fish. I also have water lettuce that is growing. I received three small plants and now have 18 plants with more budding. The last two days my PH has stayed at 7.2. I do the water test in the morning with the lights off and then in the evening while the lights are on. I have my photo period split to 3 hours in the morning and 5 hours in the evening. I just found a few more tiny baby ghost shrimp. I have counted five so far.

My CO2 is connected to a power head that is connected to a timer. Without the power head on the CO2 stays in the sponge I attached to the outtake. Every so often at night a large bubble escapes. When it is on I get very fine bubbles all over my tank. Not sure about bubbles per minute. I don't have a bubble counter set up yet. My CO2 indicator stays green during the day but turns more blue at night. I had a bad algae and diatom problem that has cleared up since adding the CO2. They cyno just got worse.

I have done extensive research on how to cure cyno bacteria aka blue green algae. None of the other treatments have made a dent in it. The no light just wilted my plants. Increasing water flow caused it to grow more. Before I added snails I tried some salt which someone suggested. Didn't work. Erythromycin works on gram negative bacteria not gram positive. BB is gram positive for the most part. Cyno is gram negative. The only bacteria type Erythromycin kills. All my research says it will not harm my filter if I use it as instructed. It is the die off of the cyno that can spark ammonia and nitrite swings. I will keep a check on it and vacuum it out daily. I will keep very careful check of my water. I used the first dose last night and I am already seeing results. My fish, snails, and shrimp are fine so far. The fish that died did so before the treatment started.

I am not going to add any more fish until my tank is at least 6 months old.

Here is a picture that is a few weeks old. Took it before I added the amazon sword. Everything has grown a lot. will get a more recent picture as soon as I can.

 

[Mebbid]

Last week after adding the Loaches I checked and my nitrate had jumped to 40-80. The red color is hard for me to distinguish between. No ammonia or nitrite showed up. I did a 60% or better water change and got it down to 20. Everything I have read says that more water changes are better but I am beginning to rethink that. I use Prime to treat the water.

I have yet to see any issues caused by frequent water changes. I do a 10% water change daily in my breeding tanks and the fry really couldn't care less about it. I also had a 29g tank running for quite a while and had to do 2 water changes weekly to keep things in balance to make up for me way overfeeding the tank. The only time I've ever seen a fish stress out about a water change is when I did a 90% change because of a GBR that had a fungal infection.

Also, what are you using to test the levels in your water?

 

[Zimmanski]

What are you using to test your water?

BB can die off or stop working if ph drops enough causing high ammonia which I would think is the cause of the red gills in your dead fish, but you say ammonia is 0 so I'm unsure. Ph swings can definitely stress fish to death, so maybe a combination of things is to blame. How big is the tank? From the looks of the picture I would say 3bps is a lot for it and may be causing issues but you say you don't have a bubble counter so I'm unsure as how you getting 3bps. The drop checker is only for a good estimate at what your co2 levels are but takes 5-10 minutes to change colors and has nothing to do with your water parameters other than that. Some of this may have been said already and if it has sorry, I only made it so far through your other thread. Sorry you're having issues and losing pets, that's no fun and frustrating I know.

Edit: oh and what water conditioner are you using with your water changes?

 

[Mebbid]

Also, what is the ph of the water you're adding into your tank? The ph of water straight from the tap is usually a bit different than tap water that's been sitting out for a few days.

 

[wildroseofky]

I appreciate all the help everyone is giving me. I often recommend this site to others wanting an aquarium because everyone on here is so helpful.

My tank size is 29 gallons. I use the API Master test kit to check my water. I just replaced the Ammonia and Nitrite tests a few weeks ago. I am getting low on Nitrate test and will reorder in a couple of weeks. The Ph test is the same one that came with the original kit. I bought the kit around October, 3 months into my 10 gallon tank. The bpm is a guesstimate. I experimented with a setup on my 10 gallon before adding it to my 29 gallon. With the mixture I am using it was giving me around 3 bubbles per second in my 10. My ph crash in the 29g tank did reduce my bacteria from 40 or better to staying around 10-20 with occasional spikes. Probably from overfeeding and missed pockets of poo.

I am just going to go with I missed something when adding the loaches and a combination of things caused their deaths. No more fish util my tank is at least 6 months old and all test remain stable. My other three fish are doing fine. I found more very tiny ghost shrimp babies. They at least like my tank. My nerites are growing. I found white lines around the front of the shells and started researching shell problems. I have heard nerites are prone to shell deterioration and was worried that was what it was. Turns out it is just them adding more shell. They don't have holes, cracks, or see through shells so no problems. I thought the two smallest ones looked bigger.

My Ph did fall to 6,8 last night. I added some more baking soda. I am going to go out and get some limestone today. Turns out I have a lot of it in my yard. Live out in the woods of eastern Kentucky in the Appalachian hills. I will
add a bubble counter today. I have been too busy and on the road to much to fool with it yet.

My cyno bacteria is clearing up with the erythromycin. My nitrate is still at 20. No ammonia or nitrite. All the tank occupants are doing fine.

 

[Zimmanski]

Just don't get discouraged! These things happen and you're probably right that it was several minor things that added up. My suggestion would just try to keep a stable ph, 6.8 isn't too bad for most fish. Stability is key. Good luck to ya!