Coleallensmom
Planted Tank Enthusiast
mickitiffen said:Water parameters have tested normal, no ammonia present, nitrites(3), nitrate(40)
How long has this tank been running? Those water parameters are NOT normal for a cycled tank. An established tank should not have any nitrite reading; especially not one that high. If it is an established tank, then how often are you doing maintenance? 1x Weekly PWCs go a long way towards keeping your tank/fish healthy.
If this is a newly setup tank, we are in a whole different ball game. When still in the cycling process, those daily water changes you spoke of can be very important but sometimes it becomes necessary to do more than one PWC a day to control the spikes in ammonia and nitrIte that happen along the course of a cycle. The reason the previous posters have recommended doing several emergency PWCs is because of your high nitrite reading. Anything over .25ppm of ammonia or nitrite can be harmful to your fish, so you can just imagine what the 3ppm reading is doing to them. If you leave it that high, you will experience more fish deaths...hence the recommended extra PWCs. Amquel/Prime may help detoxify nitrite but fresh water is the only good way to get those levels lower. For that very reason, make sure you are doing no less then 50% PWC's while still cycling.