help! i think my fish are dying!

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westonegirl

Aquarium Advice Newbie
Joined
Dec 24, 2009
Messages
3
hi everyone. thanks in advance for the help. i have a ten gallon tank with 3 corys, 4 guppies, and a couple ghost shrimp. All the fish are small and will hopefully get a chance to move to my 55 gallon tank in a week or so. i noticed today that one of my corys has a spot on his head. it looks almost like he rubbed the skin off, it's pale and human flesh colored kinda. it immediately did a tank cleaning, vacuum gravel and about 50% water change. i was too freaked out to test the water first. after the change the water tested fine. then my mystery snail died. then my female guppies are starting to turn black starting from the tail end first. as far as i can see, the male guppies and the other two corys look fine. i've lost 5 or so ghost shrimp over the past couple weeks also. please help me figure this out. this is my first aquarium and sometimes i feel i'm stumbling around in the dark. thanks again.

kerry
 
What do you mean by "fine" for your water tests? (Numbers are much better.)

How long has the tank been running?
 
Agree. The answers to the above questions may help narrow it down. What is your normal maintenance routine? What type of test kit are you using? What water treatment product do you use?
 
thanks for the replies. i'm using jungley 5 in 1 quick dips. nitrates are at 20, nitrites are at.5, total hardness is at 300(i use well water and 3 dif stores told me this should be ok when they tested my water), total alkalinity is at 300, and ph is at 7.8

i let this tank cycle for 8 weeks and the fish have been there 3 weeks.

it has been almost 2 weeks since i vacuumed gravel and did a bigger water change. i'm afraid this was a big mistake.

i use stress coat and hagen cycle.

please don't be irritated with me. for some reason, i'm having a hard time picking up on this. i'm finding it really challenging.

i took some pictures too and if it's ok, i'll post them. thanks so much!

kerry
 
to cycle the tank, i set it up and ran it, fed every other day and followed the directions on the bottle of cycle. thank you xmas money. i'll be ordering those tonight. what can i do in the meantime?
 
Water changes will be your best bet. Just treat and temp match.
 
Thats pretty unusual. At first since you mentioned that there were spots on the heads of the cories, I thought that they had hole-in-head disease. But since they survived without any treatment and since your other fish are not doing so well, they had some other kind of ailment. From the looks of it, I would say that something has caused extreme stress on your fish. Fish such as guppies will often change colors when under a lot of stress, before becoming sick and dying. Shrimp do not tolerate a lot of stress and it is not long before they are dead. I recommend doing another water change a few days after the one that you first did. The water change is the best way you can alleviate any type of stress. But as I said, wait a few days in between water changes because new water too often will do the opposite and put stress on your fish.
 
Thats pretty unusual. At first since you mentioned that there were spots on the heads of the cories, I thought that they had hole-in-head disease. But since they survived without any treatment and since your other fish are not doing so well, they had some other kind of ailment. From the looks of it, I would say that something has caused extreme stress on your fish. Fish such as guppies will often change colors when under a lot of stress, before becoming sick and dying. Shrimp do not tolerate a lot of stress and it is not long before they are dead. I recommend doing another water change a few days after the one that you first did. The water change is the best way you can alleviate any type of stress. But as I said, wait a few days in between water changes because new water too often will do the opposite and put stress on your fish.

I absolutely could not disagree more. Water changes remove pollutants (primarily nitrogenous). There is no reason to wait in between water changes. If this were our tank, I'd be doing 50-75% every day or at least every other day. Dilution is the solution to pollution.
 
+1 HN1.
I had to cycle one of my tanks with a BGK, one very sensitive fish, and I did 50-70% pwc's every single day, (sometimes twice) for 4 weeks....And that was only 1 fish producing waste.
 
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