Unfortunately, I just replaced two of them yesterday so they are new. So, where do I get the foam? Is this something that I would purchase at a fish store or is it just regular foam I might find at Walmart?
I have been using expert.com and corresponding with a person on there regarding my particular situation and she is telling me to treat with Coppersafe and MII. I hope she is correct because I have been getting so much wrong information and it is leading to loss of fish for me.
I currently have a pair of jewel parents with about 35-40 6-week old fry on one side of a 55g tank, and as I'm using a tank divider, I have 6 barbs, 1 rainbow shark, 1 raphael catfish, a peacock cichlid and 2 glass barbs on the other side. I have been doing water changes every 2-3 days since the fry were born since I have to feed them so much and it's way too many fish for a 55g. I certainly was not intending to "make babies", it just happened and once they were born my inclination was to do everything possible to save them. Unfortunately, it has put such a huge bio strain on my tank that now some of the inhabitants are showing signs of disease. The daddy jewel is the one who looks like he's at death's door so I am frantic about trying to save him. All of my other fish "look" healthy with the exception of a few barbs whose fins seem a little "shredded", but not discolored or red. None of the other inhabitants are gasping for air or anything.
I just ran to my LFS and bought another filter for a tank I had in the garage that I am going to use. It's a 30g and I just finished setting it up. I am planning to move the jewel family to that one in a few days. However, this other person has told me to treat my entire tank now for disease and to leave the jewels in there. I'm so sick of guessing at the expense of their lives. I don't know if I should treat the old tank (55g) and leave all the fish in it, or if I should move the jewel family to the 30g and treat both tanks? I should mention, that in a panic yesterday, I moved the daddy jewel over to a 5g I have with 5 harlequin rasboras and an apple snail in it. I did 1 tsp of Melafix in that tank. Now I'm thinking I've just contaminated that tank and should I treat that one also?
What a frickin' mess!!! In all of this, my water parameters have all been reading normal with the exception that my nitrates were a little higher this week (about 30ppm) and I usually keep them at less than 10ppm. I did a 50% water change on the main tank yesterday and I'm in the process of doing another 50% change on it today even though the parameters read okay. Don't know where to go from here except to start dumping massive chemicals into all three tanks and hope for a miracle. Thanks and sorry for the lengthy post, just very frustrated and frankly quite devastated by all of this.