ACK! New fish flopping around

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TN Tanks

Aquarium Advice Regular
Joined
Jan 20, 2004
Messages
56
Location
Nashville TN
I bought 6 tiger barbs from petsmart, and one is flopping around irratically, generally near the top. It tried to eat, its like it cant control itself. Anything I can do to help?

PS: Was at petsmart, they were selling VERY sick fish, some looked bad, others were swimming bad. Just got them in today, made me upset. And the 3 girls working in fish were stuck up and thought they knew everything about fish.
 
TN Tanks....

How long has your tank been set up and how did you acclimate the fish?? The symptoms you're describing are often associated with pH shock or ammonia toxicity.
 
In future I would suggest a quarantine tank to prevent such problems occurring and further infecting all your other fish. In another post TN tanks commented that the tank Im assuming it is your 135gal or there abouts had been cycled. I wouldn't think it is your tank caused the problem if it is cycled so possibly it is shock from leaving the Petsmart tank.

A general rule I also use is to NOT buy fish from a tank where fish look ill or dead fish are present. If other fish from the store also looked ill I would also suggest not purchasing any fish at all as some places in Australia filter all there water with only one filter if that makes sense... ie - one filter, filtering 5 or more tanks.

In future I would also recommend asking to see the fish you intend to buy eat as well as asking when they received the stock in the tank. The fish you have may have only just arrived.

Sorry to hear about your fish, there is not much in my opinion that you can do other than leave it in the tank if you MUST or remove it asap and monitor it. If the fish is poisoned I dont think there is anything that can be done... it may well live but wont be anywhere near as active.

When I introduce my fish to my tanks I generally leave these in quarantine then introduce them into the tank slowly. Fisrtly I switch my light of to prevent shock and then let them acclimatize in the QT water in a bag inside the tank Im introducing too. After five mins or so I add water from the tank to the bag slowly then release the fish after around 20mins from the initial acclimatizing. Other people may have different ways but this works great for me. I leave the light of for the remainder of the day until switching it on the next morning.

Hope this helps :wink:
 
Just to add a little more I wouldn't recommend feeding after introducing them into the tank for the first day. This will be fine as fish can go for awhile without food from what I have read and mine don't seem to care too much.

The beauty of this is that it prevents the new fish having to contend with the others whilst being stressed.

Just so you know this is my method and I'm sure others will recommend otherwise. If it works for you stick to your method IMO.
 
WOW im surprised--our petsmart is usually better than that TN Tanks!! every time im in there they are cleaning the tanks!! i guess if some sort of disease hit theres nothing they can do about it tho.... well there IS but you know...

There was one girl that worked there for awhile that knew TONS about fish im not kidding... i dont know what happened to her tho... and some guy there was a jerk to me once... i was wanting to buy a plant and he asked me if i needed help..i said yeah but in a minute cause i was deciding... he said ok... anyways he SAW me walking toward him and he quickly went into a back room.... when he finally came out he was such a jerk.. i mean i know about customer service and i know people have bad days but sheeesh..

when i got my leopard danio there this girl was really nice--i told her i knew they were hard to catch so it doesnt matter which one... she was really appreciative of that.. she said most people are like "THAT ONE!!" lol...

anyways im babbling, thats what beer does, lol .... im going to get some otos tomorrow at petland.. and maybe some ghost shrimp..

sorry to hear about your fish TN tanks--i hope he pulls through alright, just dont give up on him!!
 
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