LithiumAndGold
Aquarium Advice Newbie
- Joined
- Oct 14, 2013
- Messages
- 5
I've been reading this site for about 3 weeks now and I have found everything very helpful! I had (gold)fish once when I was young and found them to be a pain because my mom would make me completely break down the tank once a week to clean it. She didn't know and neither did I that you're not supposed to do that. So when I was looking at fish at Petsmart I told the young lady that I wanted a "low maintenance fish that can go in this (betta) bowl". She told me the only thing that could go in that 1 gallon bowl was guppies, and sold me 4 (which I now know is WAY too many fish per 1 gallon of water). Well 1 of them died that night and I returned it the next day and was speaking with another young lady who told me I cannot keep guppies in that bowl because they need a filter and heater, etc. So I'm upset because all I had in mind was something low maintenance and these fish are starting to sound very high maintenance. Anyway I ended up returning the whole mess that was sold to me, fish and all, and after some research I did want to try to breed some guppies. So after only 3 weeks (lol) we have 5 tanks. I have a 2 gallon that had 2 pregnant females, 1 just gave birth and was moved to a resting tank for a day and then put in with the male in a 1 gallon. I have 2 other 1 gallon tanks that I plan to use for breeding when I have more fish and I have a 10 gallon. Remember I'm new and I didn't know about fishless cycling until AFTER I had the fish, like most other new people. So I have only 2 of the 5 tanks with fish in them. At least I learned from my mistakes and I'm fishless cycling the other 3! I just got the API Freshwater test kit in the mail from Amazon 3 days ago and I tested the water in each tank. (I also added some kind of tank starter to each tank to speed the process up, I haven't seen that anywhere on here so I'm not sure if that was the right thing to do?) The 10 gallon and 2 1 gallon breeding tanks have almost cycled completely. Oh I bought some hornwort and put a little in each tank. My PROBLEM (after this long story, I know) is that I think I have a problem with my tap water. I've been doing water changes religiously twice a day in both tanks that have fish in them, admittedly at different amounts that range from 10-50%. I've practiced and practiced not to overfeed. My 2 gallon with the 16 2 day old fry and 1 pregnant female are pH 7.3, Ammonia .5, Nitrites 0, and Nitrates 80ppm! The 1 gallon is even worse! Last night it read pH 7.2, Ammonia 0, Nitrites 0, Nitrates 160ppm! So I started googling how to get rid of nitrates and the resounding answer was frequent water changes. Well I know that's not the answer in my case because I've been doing them twice a day. So I tested my tap water and the nitrates are 80ppm from the tap. I think it's because I live on a heavily fertilized farm. I don't think the hornwort can keep up with that many nitrates. So I freaked out and did ANOTHER water change last night with bottled water instead. I just read today that I probably should've done it slower because the pH is probably different and can shock the fish. I don't know about this reverse osmosis because it sounds expensive and I'm limited on space. I've also read you shouldn't put a lot of chemicals into your tank but I'm wondering if there's a trusted brand of some kind of nitrate remover I could add? Like everybody else I don't want to feel irresponsible and kill the fish or have them get sick. Also I have googled and found varying answers about this but my female that just gave birth, she had developed these black dots on the top of her head near her eyes and then gave birth 2-3 days after that and I don't see the dots anymore. Now my other female has them too and I'm wondering if this is a disease or related to pregnancy? Anyway thanks for reading my very long story and any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated!