I need EMERGENCY help

[Ariamus]

All,

This morning I woke up and the water in my big tank was really cloudy. I turned the lights on and found half of my fish dead and the other half all at the surface of the water (including the remaining algae eaters). I have never had anything like this happen and I have no clue what caused it. I still haven't done readings on the water quality but I checked all of them on Monday and they were as follows:

PH 6.1
Ammonia 0.0 ppm
Nitrites 0.0 ppm
Nitrates ~ 7.5 ppm
GH & KH 1 degree each
Temperature 80 degrees farenheit.

The tank is about two and a half months old. It has completely cycled and I have have had fish in there for a few weeks now. I had a problem with some fish and parasites but I quarantined all of them and this tank has been problem free for quite a while.

On tuesday, I added new fish; 4 tri-color sharks and 4 albino algae eaters and a couple o plants. The LFS that I purchased all of the above at I trust implicitly for the quality of their livestock. However, I did notice that there were little white quivering jelly-like specks clinging to the sides of the tank on Tuesday afternoon and evening but by yesterday, they were all gone.

Yesterday, I also added some decorations and all seemed well the remainder of the day. When I went to bed, all the fish looked fine. The last things I added were some CO2 fizz tabs for the plants' sake and I added some water to compensate for evaporation; about 5 gallons. The fizz tabs are Jungle Plant Care Solutions Fizz tabs. I've used them quite successfully before. The dosage is one tablet per 10 gallons and I added 8 total. The water is the same spring water that I've always used to fill my tanks. It's perfect for aquarium use in that it comes out of the ground at about 55 degrees with a PH of about 6.2, no traces of ammonia or nitrite, and about 1 degree GH and KH.

Then this morning...

I'm off to check the quality of the water and extract the remaining bodies but I'm extraordinarily worried that putting the living fish in my other tank will be a death knell for the fish in there. I would appreciate it if anyone could provide some assistance. I figure I have just a couple of hours before the water in the bowl with the remaining fish gets too cold for their good so I'm hoping someone can help me before I have to make a decision that may harm all the fish and water quality in my smaller tank. TIA.

 

[TomK2]

Welcome to AA Ariamus!

Sorry for your troubles. I have no experience with low pH tanks, and therefore have lots of suspicions about your pH causing tank woes. Plus the fact that if your co2 tabs work, they will lower the pH further? And the nitrogen cycle might be impaired at a low pH, and you just added livestock.

let us know what your tests show, and when the rest of the AA folks get to work and sign on I am sure there will be more help.

 

[Ariamus]

All,

I just concluded a new round of tests on the water quality and there has been a spike in Nitrites and Nitrates. The Nitrites spike, from 0.0 to 0.5 ppm, is congruent with the addition of new livestock just two days ago. The Nitrates spike is much more troublesome in its severity. Nitrates measure at greater than 160 ppm (up from less than 10). The Fizz tabs have "trace elements" but is it possible that they could have caused this?

 

[Ariamus]

Tom,

I didn't think to do a PH test because I never associated a disastrous occurrence with a sudden change in PH; I always thought that such disastrous occurrences were more likely to be associated with jumps in ammonia and/or nitrites. But I went and checked it just now and it actually jumped to 6.4 or so. The low number isn't a concern; I'm shooting for a PH of 6.5 or less as that is what most cyprinids thrive with.

 

[Ariamus]

I'm beginning to formulate a theory about what happened...

Other changes that I forgot to mention were that I removed one of the flourescent bulbs from the lighting setup and I decreased the number of hours of lighting from 12 to 10. Since plants produce oxygen during the day but at night, they consume it, the new plants (a large sword and two java ferns) combined with the new fish, and the lowered amount of light to produce an inordinate amount of CO2. Then, the addition of the CO2 tabs further exacerbated an allready bad situation. Finally, overnight, the consumption of what oxygen remained killed a large portion of my fish.

It's just a hypothesis but it certainly explains the fact that the fish that died were by and large, the larger specimens I had and all the tiny ones (white clouds, cherry bards) survived. It explains the fact that the living fish were at the surface "gasping" for air when I awoke this morning. It explains what might cause one of my deceased Tiger Barbs to jump out of the tank entirely (I found his driied husk sitting on the floor behind the tank.)

But like I said, it's just a hypothesis. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Is there a readily available way that I can test the water for CO2 and O2?

 

[SteveM]

Here is a link that explains how to measure your CO2:

http://www.csd.net/~cgadd/aqua/art_plant_co2chart.htm

I have no direct experience, but I think you are asking for trouble to put CO2 into a tank with that low KH.

Sorry but I have to run to work now, see the following for more:

http://www.koivet.com/html/articles...article_id=206&category=12&name=Water+Quality

http://www.forum.apistogramma.com/printthread.php?t=2985

 

[Big C]

Hey Ariamus, I'm not expert but I would do a masive water change to start with, and after that do all the investigation you want, but try to save the ones you have left!

Really sorry to hear about this!

 

[Ariamus]

An update

All,

First of all, I wanted to thank everyone for the help. I wanted to give an update.

As for the update:

1) All the fish that survived the night have survived into today. All in all, I lost 10 of 25 fish (sadly including the 5 tiger and black-ruby barbs that I've had for more than two years now).

2) Another round of water tests this morning yielded Ammonia readings of 0.0 ppp, Nitrites of about 0.25 ppm, and the Nitrates have leveled off a bit to about 80 ppm. PH increased again to 6.5.

3) I did a 30 gallon water change yesterday and I added another bubble wand to the tank to increase aeration/circulation. The water was noticeably clearer by yesterday evening and almost crystal clear by the time I left home for work this morning.

4) I increased the light input in the aquarium by putting back in the second light bulb and expanding the on-time from 10 to 14 hours. Assuming all remains OK for a few days, I'll decrease the light time to 12 hours early next week.

5) In addition to that, I'm going to add a third bubble wand to the tank and set them up so that at least one will run all the time (ie, at night as well) to help keep another overnight catastrophe from happening.

6) Finally, assuming water quality doesn't diminish (as far as the values that I could check, it never really did deteriorate seeing how the only thing that "spiked" was the nitrate level) I'll put a few of the smaller fish back in the tank in another day or two and see how it goes.

At this point, I'm completely operating under the assumption that there was a severe CO2 spike (02 drop) that suffocated most of my larger fish. It is the only explanation that I can think of. Since there were no changes in temperature, that couldn't be the cause. And, as far as I know, there is no disease that would kill such a large group of fish without ANY warning whatsoever. The factors of increasing the number of CO2 producers, decreasing the amount of CO2 consumption time (and conversely increasing it's production even further), and artificially introducing even more CO2 into the system all at relatively the same time lead to the aforementioned conclusion as to what caused the accident in question.

 

[greenmaji]

Ive been doing research in the planted aquaium area and your kh is too low for your target ph.. let me explain.. the water will not be able to hold the CO2 level that you are trying to reach. the levels you were trying to add to the tank were leathal to the fish.. you need to have a kh of 2 at your target ph of 6.5 in order to have a CO2 level of 19mg/l wich is low level good for plants.. I hope this helps...

 

[Ariamus]

green...

I thought of that and I decided that it may be prudent to scrap the idea of a very low PH and low hardness. Given the fact that most Cyprinids prefer "soft, acidic to neutral water" I figure the approach to take is to raise the PH. I'm going to do that; I'm going to raise the PH to around 7.0. Which begs the question; knowing nothing about chemistry, does doing so balance my tank or do I also need to raise the hardness?

 

[TomK2]

well, pH, hardness, and co2 are all intimately related. Altering one can affect the other. I am too far gone from chemistry education to be confident in this subject. However, a low KH is prone to pH swings, a high KH( or alkalinity) is more stable but also causes higher pH. Low pH can inhibit the biologic filtration (some nitrifying bacteria have been shown to cease ammonia metabolism at a pH of 6, greatest nitrification efficiency at a pH of well over 7). In nature, I suspect that low pH waters have high flow (dilutional) rates so that they are not dependent on bacteria for the nitrogen cycle, but this is pure supposition on my part. This is not easily duplicated in a tank.

Again, I am suspicious of low pH, low alkalinity (KH) tanks because I suspect they may not be as stable. I would love to hear the contrary from other folks who have these tanks .

I don't know how well the fiz tabs work at adding co2. Co2 poisoning could happen, as well as oxygen deprivation too. Since most of the fish you buy are not wild caught, duplicating the pH of the original waters is not terribly important? I would think that they would have long ago adapted to the higher pH, alkalinity, and hardness of the local water so prevelant in the USA.

I hope there are no more losses for you.

 

[greenmaji]

its always a good idea to find out what PH and dKH the fish have been acclimated to before you start trying to adjust these parameters. I suspect that it is not the same as there natural conditions that you may be trying to emulate.. In fact you might want to find this out after the fact. to see how far this is off from were your tank is now! as far as rasing your PH your KH will have to go up with it.. as said they are interlocked.. the CO2 levels for a PH of 7.. your KH would need to go up to around 6.5 KH and that would be able to hold around 20 ppm.. Ive been told that this formula can be off by up to 10% but at 20 ppm that is only 2ppm ... CO2= 3KH * 10^( 7-PH) ... is the how they are interrelated..

as far as low ph low KH tanks are concerned I would assume it would be dependent on the CO2 levels in the room that houses the aquarium. these levels would be fairly low so the KH level wouldnt need to be very high to accommodate them but there does need to be some level of KH in the water. Im unsure of the bio-cycle problem with low ph values. this is theory on my part because I have never keep such an aquarium.

 

[Ariamus]

Another Update

It's been two and a half weeks since my incident and I figured I should provide an update.

After the incident that caused so much "carnage", I salvaged the remaining living fish by putting them in my other tank and I kept close tabs on the big tank. The water quality conditions remained largely unchanged (except for the bump in PH which I engineered) and the water cleared up within 24 hours. I put some of the fish back into the tank 3 days after that all the while doing daily water quality tests. Things remained stable as I eventually got all the fish that survived the disaster back into the 75 gallon tank.

Everything has remained stable since. PH is steady around 7.2 and carbonate hardness has bumped to about 5 degrees. Ammonia and Nitrites are zip and Nitrates are a manageable 5-10 ppm consistently. Given the consistent stability, I decided to add some new fish this week and all remains well. Hopefully things remain so.

finally, I wanted to thank everyone for their suggestions and help.