New member/new to fish keeping

[orligirl16]

Hello all!

I joined this group because some of the fish advice groups on facebook weren't very helpful and seemed to mostly focus on saltwater aquariums or freshwater aquariums over 55 gal.

I personally have a 10 gallon tank that I got from a garage sale site. The woman who owned it re-homed her fish due to her son not keeping his hands out of the tank. My adoptive mom, whom I will refer to as "Mom" for the sake of simplicity, went and picked up the tank for me as I am on month 2 of bed rest for a severely broken leg/shattered ankle. Mom has kept fish for many years (She's in her mid 40s). The tank came with a gravel substrate, filter, air pump, bubble stone, thermometer, some plastic plants and 3 mini fish tank action figure decorations. Mom cleaned everything before she brought it to my house and set it up for me. My biological parents also kept a large tank of Angel Fish while I was younger (before I was born through about age 7).

From then, we let the tank run for almost a month, and in that time replaced the filter, replaced all the plastic plants and decor, replaced the bubble stone and air pump, and added a heater. The tank light is on a timer, and the tank is placed away from windows.

Right now I have 8 fish in this established tank.
5 guppies (3 female, 2 male) We had more females but they contracted ich and died.
2 gold dust mollies- gender unknown
1 panda molly gender unknown.

About a week ago we finished a 5 day treatment of anti fungal/bacterial/parasitic and cleaned all of the decor inside the tank as well as replaced the carbon filter with a new one on day 7 (48plus hours after the last medication dose of Tetra aqualife).

On Sunday we lost one female guppy who's tail had either been eaten off or fell off. We removed it from the tank and the 2nd female in that group has a rather jagged tail. We tested the tank water for ammonia, nitrates, nitrites, ph, water hardness/softness, and alkalinity. All were within normal/ideal levels. We took a sample of the tank water to petsmart to be tested and found out that our town water that we had previously had checked at petsmart and was deemed "perfect" now was way over the danger zone with chlorine.

We purchased a new test kit to be able to check chlorine levels and treated the tank with stress coat and start zyme. We also did about a 30% water change and put only purified bottled water that we tested (everything within ideal/safe range) to replace the 30%.

My jagged tail femail guppy is doing a lot better, she is schooling again and eating, so hopefully it was caught in time (we had put about an inch of water in the tank on Saturday straight from the tap and lost one guppy early Sunday morning and the water was steadily becoming more cloudy as the day went on Sunday- hence taking the water in to be tested when we couldn't figure it out)

The above statement of the residents in my tank is accurate taking into account the fish we lost is not included in the count.

Other than that, I'm always looking up things about fish and really love guppies and the gold dust and panda mollies. I would eventually like to get a larger tank so I could have 3 schools- 1 for guppies, 1 for mollies, and 1 for mickey mouse platys. But that is a little ways away.

The only other member to the tank we are planning on adding would be an otocinclus (Macrotocinclus affinis) bottom swimmer/feeder for the tank and maybe another 1 or 2 female guppies so my current females aren't stressed from harassment.

Any advice is always welcome as I am still new to the art of keeping fish and an aquarium. I try my best to do as much research as possible before deciding on fish to go into the tank but there are some things that others may know from years of experience that could benefit someone new like me.

 

[Polycomb71]

That much chlorine in your local tap water was not only irritating the fish's gills, but more critically, was killing off all the good bacteria in your tank that are in charge of the nitrogen cycle. Now as the bacterial colony is reestablishing itself, the cloudiness has come back. It will soon clear up. You may consider treating your tap water with Prime or Safe manufactured by Seachem. It works almost instantly, and a small bottle goes quite a long way. Good luck.

 

[orligirl16]

I didn't think much about you saying chlorine would have irritated fishes gills. We had treated the tank with Stress coat and start zyme, and kept an eye on all the fish while checking the ammonia, nitrate, nitrite, ph, etc. We put the last of the water in this afternoon after treating it with water dechlorinator (stress coat API has water dechlorinator in it). My "gimpy girl" as I was calling my female guppy with the messed up tail fin seemed to be doing much better today, swimming around, no motor function issues or anything. Took a two hour nap and woke up when my husband came home. He did the fish count in the tank and found gimpy girl, dead hidden in the dense plants in the back corner of the tank.

What else should I do to keep my other fish safe? I've been watching the heater to make sure it stays at 78 degrees F, treated again with stress coat and start zyme again. Took the carbon filter out and rinsed it, bubbler is still on to help oxygenate the water. The 4 main guppies (2 female 2 male) seem fine and perfectly healthy, no injured fins, spots, etc. The panda molly is fine (same as the guppies) and the two gold dust mollies seem fine as well.

The 4 guppies we lost over the past 2 weeks all came from petco at the same time. Could it just have been too much and they were going to pass anyway, no matter what I did?

Thank you.

 

[Polycomb71]

I am so sorry to hear that Gimpy Girl passed away. It could have been an internal infection from that tail for that may have been the cause of her demise. Are you still getting high chlorine after the stress zyme / stress coat treatment? It is possible that you got sick/ already weak specimens from the store, that succumbed to illnesses. Otocinclus catfishes are very nice and peaceful fishes, but they prefer to be in groups, and finding healthy specimens are very hard. The wild caught ones have a very high mortality rate in fish tanks. If you can get rank-raised ones, those will have a better chance. They also need algae in the tank as they eat almost constantly. Given your tank size, a school of otos might lead to a high bioload and may not be good for the overall health of the tank. Otos also need to be introduced into biologically mature tanks.
As your tank seems to be stabilising, hopefully your current fish stock are going to do well from now on. Please keep an eye on the water parameters, and things should be under control.

 

[orligirl16]

After the zyme and coat, as of 6am and on yesterday (4/19) the chlorine was not registering on the test at all. I'm wondering if the specimens I got, the 4 female guppies that have all now died- we got them at the same time. Lost 2 within 17 hours due to possible ich but no idea about the chlorine content as I didn't know to test for chlorine at the time. The 3rd female was lost on Mon or Tues, and then Gimpy Girl at about 5pm. All from the same place, same tank, same acclimation process. The mollies (golden panda and 2 golddust) were in a completely separate tank a few tanks away from where the guppies were. I'm thinking that it was just something was wrong from the store, and then stress and chlorine did the rest. I'm taking the next week and doing daily water checks and fish check and everything is coming up safe/ideal. Ammonia is a little high- it's reading between safe and stress, but no where near danger.

As for the otos, thank you for telling me! I won't be putting them in this tank then as I have very little algae as well as not enough room for them to be. I don't have a local live fish store, so I'm stuck with petco, petsmart, wal-mart, meijer. My petsmart fish (the first 4 guppies) are fine. The petco mollies are fine. I'm not getting fish from Wal-mart just because the local ones I've already reported for being filthy and dead fish bones on the bottom. Haven't looked at Meijer, but for the time being, I need to make sure my water situation is under control before making any more decisions. Also, nearest live fish shop is over 2 hours away- so that's a no go.

In about 2 weeks I'll go back to petsmart when the gent that helped us from the beginning is working. He is very knowledgeable and was not out to make a sale, plus he remembers me because I'm in a wheelchair for the time being. We will just probably get about 4 more fancy female guppies to keep the harassment of the 2 male guppies even so no one is stressed and not add anyone else so the tanks not overpopulated. At that point I would have 11 fish in a 10 gal tank. Planning on getting a 20 or 30 gal in about a month or 2 during the petco $1 per gallon sale.

Thank you so much for your help. I'll try to upload pictures of my tank as soon as I can.