new fish look sick

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scrmom

Aquarium Advice Activist
Joined
Aug 2, 2006
Messages
112
Location
Fredericksburg Virginia
I have had sw tank for 2 years now. I haven't purchased any fish since the first 4 I got when I set up the tank. Yesterday I purchased a foxface and scissortail goby. I have them in a 10g qt. The qt consists of a hoh filter and I had that on the main tank x 1 week, a heater, ph, and pvc pipe. Both fish were looking fine. I tested the water this morning and the level is 5 for ammonia everything else negative. salinity was 1.30. so I immediately did 25% water change half ro/di freshwater and the other half from main tank. The salinity is down 1.25. The fish are staying together in the lower bottom of tank and look like they are breathing pretty fast. what else could be wrong? temp is 78degrees.

Oh, also the fish were at the lfs since July 30th and they both looked very healthy.
 
Is your QT cycled? Was the hoh filter running on your other tank? If not, there's your problem
 
Ammonia levels of 5.0ppm are the main problem. Obviously that HOB filter wasn't enough to deal with the sudden increase in bioload so you're going to have to do several water changes a day to get those ammonia levels under control.

Also try to match your salinity with those water changes. The sudden jump from 1.030 to 1.025 that you did with that one water change probably didn't do them much good either.
 
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Hey Scrmom, Good to hear from you but sorry for the reason. You`ll need to do some frequent PWC`s and keep testing your QT and keep that ammonia as low as you can.
 
Just an update the fish are looking great. They are eating and swimming all around. I have been doing 25% PWC daily. I'll take pictures once I move them in main tank. (a week or so)
 
Just an update the fish are looking great. They are eating and swimming all around. I have been doing 25% PWC daily. I'll take pictures once I move them in main tank. (a week or so)

Just my opinion, but I'd sure leave them in the QT for the full four weeks. Especially since they had a somewhat traumatic first few days and any illness from that stress (or any existing parasites) might take more than a week to show up.

But sure glad they're doing fine! That's great news!
 
When i have fish in qt i like to add a little ammo lock to the tank as well as the daily water changes to ensure that the ammonia stays at zero. Glad to hear that the fish are doing well.
 
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