The calculator I was using to stock with changed????

[Abby256]

That of course would also explain why the illness wasn't behaving as any type of fish illness that I could find and the symptoms kept showing up differently in individual fish. If they were poisoned that makes sense. And to start with I thought it must have been ammonia poisoning but none of the physical discoloration was there and I kept testing at perfect 0 levels on everything. That would also explain why frequent water changes and salt didn't work and why with the meds they would appear to work and then stop because if poison is slowly leaching out well it's going to do it at different rates. It also explains why the fish only showed outward physical signs of being sick at the end. And why it was only after removing the driftwood that they began to heal and it would explain why I still lost a few after pulling out the driftwood I mean if they had that much damage already or had poison built up in their systems.

 

[Abby256]

Oh and I did wonder if it was from the rock we bought there maybe leaching out heavy metals or some sort of deposit in the rock. I took the rock out fairly early and then things kept getting worse even with a massive water change (to try to remove metal if it was present) and changing all filter media and adding beneficial bacterial and salt back into the water. I would be willing to join you in making that bet. It's the only thing that fits especially since my initial gut reaction was poisoning just from the rock and possibly the water parameters. I would have never thought of the wood getting contaminated from pesticides. It makes further sense if you think of them just throwing a bug bomb off in there since they had a separate fish room. OMG I am so glad I didn't buy the IAL from them that night and ordered it from some very reputable sellers from Thailand. I could have lost my bettas too. After that poisoning incident the only fish I'm seriously attached to are the bettas and they are the only ones who have been named now. Well I take that back... my oldest surviving platty a female we have a nickname for.

 

[paytertot]

Wait.. if you changed all of your filter media, then you threw away all of your BB.. which means you probably started another cycle...

 

[blert]

Wait.. if you changed all of your filter media, then you threw away all of your BB.. which means you probably started another cycle...

Possible but not necessarily. There are a few of us on here that routinely replace all of our filter media, though we take precautions and have sufficiently established aquariums that we don't have to worry about "mini-cycles". Just keep an eye on the toxin levels daily for a while just in case.

 

[Abby256]

I'm sure I did but the alternative was far worse and remember this was after I had tried doing frequent water changes and adding salt. I was convinced certain initially it was poisoning but never imagined it to be from the driftwood. After all it came from the store as ready to go and had been thoroughly boiled and soaked. I chose what I believed the lesser of two evils. Getting rid of whatever was in the water from the rock. Of course it was all or nothing and that meant losing the bb too. Given my options and initial diagnosis though I thought it better to rid the tank of the contaminate and maybe lose a few fish that were already so weakened I might lose them anyway than to keep exposing all of the fish to the contaminate. I also used API Stability over the next seven days of having done this. I'm not saying this was the right thing to do because when faced with too bad choices I can only try my best to pick the lesser of the two evils. Did I make the right choice? I have no idea. I could have removed each if the three different media I have in my filters and staggered it out at different times to try to keep my bb but I was afraid one clean media would only suck in the contaminate reamining in the other media and the water. Was that the right thing to do? I don't know. In the end I don't think it mattered because without a shadow of a doubt in my mind it was the driftwood which I didn't suspect until last because of the aforementioned reasons. Please keep in mind when we visited the store it was reasonably clean. We only found out afterwards about it from multiple sources. Also I had already tried conservative methods to heal my fish PWC and salt. And thirdly I didn't want to medicate until I knew what to medicate for and how do you do that when there are no physical outward signs of illness but the fish are just acting weird and none if them are behaving in the same weird manner as the next one? If one of them acted like it was something bacterial the next would act like it had a parasite. After a few weeks of this and several fish just dropping dead with nothing physically wrong with them appearance wise one of the platties developed what looked like and sounded like columnaris. I treated for it. The platty got well and everyone was fine. A few days later I had I think it was one platty and one catfish die. No marks nothing on their bodies. What appeared to be and fit with columnaris showed up again so I treated with a stronger Med this time. Now everyone was fine for a week then I start getting the strange behavior again no marks no symptoms no nothing. Just half the tank acting weird in different ways that doesn't fit anything. I spent hours each night after work trying to research freshwater fish diseases. I knew it definitely wasn't hole in the head or seceptia or however you spell that one. There was no fungus that was present at this point. I had read columnaris can be tricky tricky and that was the only thing I had to go on. So I treated again for it. I mean you know yes I was afraid of overmedicating but there was already a pattern and the pattern was they were going to all die anyway. So they seemed to get better then more dead. I waited a while so as to allow them to recover and thought I had it this time. There were no marks save for that one saddleback presentation of columnaris and that had not been present for a while. Unseen so even though there had been no glancing scratching etc... I treated for parasites. Everyone seemed fine. Then I lost little girl. Little boy had been one of two males in my tank. Little boy the smaller of the two. He had died a few weeks earlier. Little girl was his daughter. I had raised her from a fry. He was the only platty of his color variation in the tank. She looked and acted just like him. That's when I broke down the whole tank and found weird stuff under the driftwood. After pulling it out I had a few catfish die the next day or so. I found the fungus looking stuff coming out of their gills and thought well maybe it was fungus this whole time. But why would it just now after all this tine show up? Since the driftwood has been out some time now my remaining three seem OK. One of the two remaining platties still doesn't act right but I honestly believe she is just permanently damaged and not going to infect the other two or the three platty fry who became too large to stay in the fry tank. I moved them into the platty tank and as my husband put it he's at his wit's end as to what to do and they either die or get healthy.

 

[Abby256]

Sorry for the length. This has been a lengthy ordeal. It was almost like a disease in humans that attacks the immune system. You know someone with one of those diseases almost never dies directly from it but from a resulting complication. For pesticides contaminating the wood makes sense to me because most of that stuff from what I understand attacks the bugs functioning systems. Also a lot of it is designed to be time released and keeps working after the initial contact. We live in the country and I can clean and scrub all I want to and still get bugs. I use borax. The dogs won't touch the stuff and how I place it it can't get into the tanks but before I got tanks we had an exterminator come in. He sprayed all over every single pot and pan I own. I told him he need not come back. The borax is like $3 bucks anyway and works a lot better and is very safe.