White string on Poop

[HooKooDooKu]

I have twice today seen a while long string attatched to the end of a piece of poop in our fish tank. When I remove the poop with a stick, the string stays stretched out as long as part of it is in the water.

I just moved our 4-6 month old common gold fish from a 10 gallon tank to a 20 gallon tank late last week. The tank is basically already cycled because I had already been using a throttled down FluVal 2 (rated for 23 gallons) filter in the 10 gallon tank, and I already had the 20 gallon tank set up for over a week running on an old FluVal 1 filter that I had kept it's filter pad submerged in the 10 gallon tank and feeding the tank some ACE Hardware ammonia.

Anyway, ammonia and nitrite levels are zero (didn't test nitrate... had done a 100% PWC before moving the fish over just three days ago).

In addition to the common, there is a single rosy red, a pair of ghost shrimp, a pair of amono shrimp, and a small bunch of MTS (the MTS were added only a few weeks ago).

The fish are feed a combination of freeze-dried blook worms, goldfish flakes, and goldfish pellets.

Any idea what this white string is?

 

[GhostKnife]

Im not sure about the string. However why did you do a 100% water change on the tank before adding fish?

 

[jsoong]

A thin white stringy poop *may* indicate an internal infection. However, I wouldn't go around adding antibiotics just based on that. If the fish is acting sick - lethargy, buoyancy problems, etc. - then treatment is reasonable. Otherwise I would just watch for a few days & see if this is just a one-off thing or if it is recurring.

You might want to clear the gut by feeding peas or other veggies. Constipated fish will have long stringy poop, and it might be white ... depending on the food eaten.

 

[HooKooDooKu]

Im not sure about the string. However why did you do a 100% water change on the tank before adding fish?

It was really for a couple of things. For one, it was to make sure all of the ammonia was out of the tank. But the other thing was to finish cleaning/washing the substrate.

While I rinsed the substrait about as well as I could before putting it in the tank, there were still some fine particles floating in the water after the substrait was stirred up. One of the ways I've found to get rid of these fine particles when setting up a new tank is to stir the substrait up as much as possible, then empty the tank as fast as possible with a LARGE hose (as in larger than 1/2"). Do that two or three times and you'll have pretty clean water without having to wait for the stuff to settle (which means it can get stirred up again) or wait for the filter to filter it all out.

 

[GhostKnife]

Well I would watch for a mini cycle as you just removed all of the water you just got done cycling. After the original cycle all you should need to do would be PWCs to keep your nitrates down.

 

[HooKooDooKu]

Well I would watch for a mini cycle as you just removed all of the water you just got done cycling. After the original cycle all you should need to do would be PWCs to keep your nitrates down.

Huh?

It doesn't work that way (at least not based on what I THINK I've learned from this web site).

The bacteria live (mostly) on the surface of things, not in the water itself. Sure, there might be some free floating bacteria looking for a new home, but that's NOT the bulk of the bacteria that make up the biological filter. In my case, I have a filter that draws the water and fish "waste" (such as ammonia) through the filter, that is where the bulk of the bacteria live. Sure, over time some will grow on decorations and substraite that will help filter the water as water currents flow past these surfaces. But the bulk of the filtration is taking place inside the filter.

As evidence of this, I recently caused a mini-cycle when during a PWC I rinsed the filter media in tap water rather than PWC waste water or some other treated water. As a result, the chlorine in the tab water killed a bunch of bacteria in the filter media and it took about 3 to 5 days for the bacteria that survived on the filter media to repopulate it.

So in my case, I originally cycled my 10 gallon tank with a FluVal 1 filter. But I wasn't satisfied with the FluVal 1 (too many features were missing) so I upgraded to the FluVal 2. I kept the FluVal 1 running in the tank until the FluVal 2 had enough of a bacteria population to take over. Then under the notion I would one day build a quarinteen tank, I tucked the filter media from the FluVal 1 in a corner of the tank somewhere to avoid loosing all the bacteria off of it.

When I initially setup the 20 gallon tank, I got the FluVal 1 media from the old tank, put it back in the FluVal 1, and started running it in the new tank. I then started feeding the new tank pure ammonia. The purpose was to make sure the bacteria in the FluVal 1 media was fully repopulated, because I wanted to setup the old tank as a quarinteen tank once the new one was set up, and to start allowing some bacteria to colinize the substrait and the first few pieces of decoration I had in the new tank.

Once I finally found the time, I did a few last-minute rinses of the substrait via the stir-up and 100% PWC (ok, maybe it was only 99.9%, since the hose couldn't get the last bits of the water, and some was still in the "wet" sand substrait) and moved the fish and FluVal 2 filter from the old tank to the new tank.

I then did a cleaning of the old tank. Basically I again did the stirring of the substrait and 100% PWC to clean all the old ditrious from the old tank and then refilled it and added the old FluVal 1 filter. I then got a pair of rosies that are now in the "old" quarinteen tank awaiting a suitable time to add them to the new tank.

After three days of this new setup, I tested the water in both tanks and those tests showed 0 ammonia and 0 nitrites.