TwoFish
Aquarium Advice Apprentice
Hi! I have a 10 gallon planted tank (I honestly can't remember the kind of plants, or I'd say) with 5 black phantom tetras, a platy, a male dwarf gourami and a female honey gourami. The tank's temperature is currently at 81 degrees.
A few weeks ago, my tank got ichk (probably came in on a new fish: lesson learned, quarantine tanks are important!) which I treated but didn't realize that the medication I used would destroy my cycle. Doubly-unfortunate is that I'd started using Amquel+, so I didn't know that my tank was out of balance until I went away for three days for my birthday and returned home at one in the morning to find a tank full of clearly distressed fish. To compare, two months before this I went on vacation and I was gone for over a week and returned to completely normal water parameters even though I used vacation feeders, so my cycle was healthy at that point.
As soon as I saw how distressed my fish were, I did a water test and the Ammonia was off the charts and showed zero nitrates and nitrites. I immediately did a 50% water change and treated with AmmoLock, which I'd gotten in case of an emergency. My ammonia dropped down to 1.0 ppm. The next day I did an aggressive water change (75% or more, hard to judge on that one) and treated it only with with StressCoat and did a double-dose of bacteria supplement to try and jump start my cycle.
It's now five days later. I've been doing 20% + water changes daily to keep the Ammonia at .25 ppm or lower (mostly it's hovering around .25). A recent test showed that my nitrates were on the rise (still below 5.0PPM), although nitrites are still AWOL.
The fish have perked back up and my male black phantom's twitching has relaxed significantly (whew!). I'm keeping a close eye on everyone's fins and gills for signs of illness and everyone appears very healthy and active and all are eating normally.
My question is this: Is there anything else I should be doing or should I just keep on keeping-on?
I really don't want to treat the ammonia chemically if I can just tough it out until the tank's cycle re-establishes.
A few weeks ago, my tank got ichk (probably came in on a new fish: lesson learned, quarantine tanks are important!) which I treated but didn't realize that the medication I used would destroy my cycle. Doubly-unfortunate is that I'd started using Amquel+, so I didn't know that my tank was out of balance until I went away for three days for my birthday and returned home at one in the morning to find a tank full of clearly distressed fish. To compare, two months before this I went on vacation and I was gone for over a week and returned to completely normal water parameters even though I used vacation feeders, so my cycle was healthy at that point.
As soon as I saw how distressed my fish were, I did a water test and the Ammonia was off the charts and showed zero nitrates and nitrites. I immediately did a 50% water change and treated with AmmoLock, which I'd gotten in case of an emergency. My ammonia dropped down to 1.0 ppm. The next day I did an aggressive water change (75% or more, hard to judge on that one) and treated it only with with StressCoat and did a double-dose of bacteria supplement to try and jump start my cycle.
It's now five days later. I've been doing 20% + water changes daily to keep the Ammonia at .25 ppm or lower (mostly it's hovering around .25). A recent test showed that my nitrates were on the rise (still below 5.0PPM), although nitrites are still AWOL.
The fish have perked back up and my male black phantom's twitching has relaxed significantly (whew!). I'm keeping a close eye on everyone's fins and gills for signs of illness and everyone appears very healthy and active and all are eating normally.
My question is this: Is there anything else I should be doing or should I just keep on keeping-on?
I really don't want to treat the ammonia chemically if I can just tough it out until the tank's cycle re-establishes.
