possumcraft
Aquarium Advice Newbie
- Joined
- Feb 10, 2014
- Messages
- 4
Hi, I'm Possum and I'm pretty close to the point of tearing my hair out.
Set up my tank in August last year, it's 240 liter with gravel substrate and no live plants. Decor is fake plants and resin ruins (all from the same place I bought the tank). There's an undergravel filter powered by an air brick plus a traditional filter in the corner, various size sponges and a carbon sponge. Two heaters, with a temp range from 26-26.5c day to night.
Water parameters have always been as close to perfect as I could hope for, PH a consistent 7.0 with 0 for Ammonia and Nitrate and just a trace of Nitrite (or the other way around... the highly toxic one is always 0).
Inhabitants are or were a host of smallish fish and lots of shrimp: 2x Harlequin Rasbora, a few neon tetra, some cardinal tetra, 8x coral red pencilfish, 1x pipefish, 12 female snakeskin guppies, 8 male snakeskin guppies, a host of shrimp (mix of red cherry, snowball, sakura and some tiny little brown and white striped ones) and a single frog. Oh, and Boris the Mighty, who is an unidentified big black shrimp who rules the tank. I think that is/was everyone.
Okay so the problem; I'm suddenly losing female guppies and pencilfish at a rate of 2-3 a day. I've had the Pencilfish for about 4 months without losing a single one and in the last 2-3 weeks I've lost 6 of them. The female guppies are now down to 6, too.
Over christmas (I was away and had housesitters) the tank got a case of whitespot which was entirely limited to the Cardinal Tetra. I got back and went out immediately, bought medicine and applied it. One fish was too far gone, unfortunately, but everyone else survived and the whitespot when away.
One of the male guppies was a bit pale around this time and stayed so for several weeks before suddenly ballooning up. After another week it was clear he had dropsy, and he soon passed.
Nothing happened for a couple of weeks, at which point I introduced the first 4 of the female guppies. Amittedly I made the mistake of forgetting to ask if they were female at the time. They were harassed mercilessly by the remaining male guppies, little sex hounds that they are. I also added two pipefish, though I found one dead a few days later.
I was intending to go and get more females to balance them out (research says 2:1 female to male will be best) but I found a couple of the female guppies had contracted white spot. Medicine cleared it up overnight.
Unfortunately at the same time a Cardinal swelled up with dropsy and passed.
A week went by without problems, other than the female guppies getting harassed, so I went and picked up some more female guppies, eight (all the shop had left) to balance it to 12:7 female to male.
This is when my nightmare really began.
One new female was a bit skinny and became lethargic, and she died that same evening. I noticed some pale patches on some of the others and used my trusty medicine again. Obviously that hasn't worked. Since then the fish won't stop dying and I can't understand why! They aren't dying in the same manner, even, so I don't know if it's one problem or multiple problems or an underlying stress problem or or or....
I do my water changes religiously every wednesday, 20-25% of the water, scrub the algae off the glass and hoover the gravel. The only blip on my radar is that I got a reading for Ammonia on Friday last week. I use a Nutrafin liquid test kit and its Ammonia test has three broad result bands; green is all good, orange is too high, red is emergency. My reading was low in the orange, though I forgot to note down the exact PPM. The test kit said I needed to get a product to take care of it (nutrafin cycle, its like prime etc that makes water safe but also bolsters the bacteria for the filter and has fish de-stress stuff). I immediately went out and got that and added the correct amount. This was the first time EVER that I saw Ammonia in anything but the tiniest trace amount. By Saturday morning it was back to non existent.
Just this minute done a full test and results are: PH 7.0, Ammonia 0, Nitrate 5-7ppm, Nitrite 0, temp 26.0c.
I'm not exactly an experienced fishmeister and my first port of call is always google and sites like these. From the most recent symptoms (on friday) I concluded my best bet was an internal bacteria medicine which I purchased and administered.
Manner of death and symptoms have been so varied that I'm just lost. I'll try to list those that stand out:
First pecilfish to die seemed to have a cyst or something on his left underbelly with something black in its core. Found him floating upside down in the morning a few weeks ago.
A couple of the guppies that died have been lethargic, underweight (suddenly underweight, not continuosly) still seem to eat with all the others.
A couple of the guppies have lost control of swimming, partially or completely, and either hang at odd angles, bump into things or lay on the bottom helplessly.
One guppy, and this one was the most awful, had all the beautiful colour from her tail disappear until her tail was just the white bony parts. At the same time, starting at the base of her tail and gradually moving along her body, her scales lost their colour and became white and (there's no better word) crusty. It looked almost like a fish that'd been left in the sun or something. By the time she died this had extended all the way to her dorsal fin.
By and large the Pencilfish show no symptoms or any different behaviour. I'll just turn the light on and find a dead one. Every dead pencilfish has been either floating at the top or laying on the top of the filter sponges. The guppies are more often dead on the bottom of the tank.
Behaviour in the tank as a whole hasn't really changed noticeably. At the same time as removing the Ammonia and adding the bacterial medicine I added treatment for Algae, fearing that might have been the cause (every week I have to scrape green from the glass and there is stringy green crap growing on the plants that I have to scrub). Since then the tank is very much clearer and the shrimp are a lot more active. The frog is also out and about a lot more.
Since so many pencilfish have died I am noticing the remaining three hide more, staying behind plants where they used to be all out at the front and swimming around.
I also saw earlier the pipefish having what looked very much like a seizure. He was twitching all over the place, then keeled over breathing weakly. Just when I thought he was gone he flipped over and swam off and *seems* right as rain. Googling that suggests an internal parasite worm can cause seizures in pipefish, so maybe that's that...
SO thank you for reading, and sorry it's so long. I just figure the more information I can give the better the chance of saving the rest of my fish. I hate losing even a single one.
Oh! feeding. They have flakes, twice daily, with every few days a frozen brick of either mixed gubbins (blood worms etc) or daphnia. I read recently that a pot of flake food shouldn't be used for more than a month so I tossed mine out and started a new one at the same time as adding the second batch of guppies.
SO.... cautiously optimistic someone might have the tiniest bit of light to shed....
Edit: Oh. One of the Pencilfish had pop eye before he died too.
Set up my tank in August last year, it's 240 liter with gravel substrate and no live plants. Decor is fake plants and resin ruins (all from the same place I bought the tank). There's an undergravel filter powered by an air brick plus a traditional filter in the corner, various size sponges and a carbon sponge. Two heaters, with a temp range from 26-26.5c day to night.
Water parameters have always been as close to perfect as I could hope for, PH a consistent 7.0 with 0 for Ammonia and Nitrate and just a trace of Nitrite (or the other way around... the highly toxic one is always 0).
Inhabitants are or were a host of smallish fish and lots of shrimp: 2x Harlequin Rasbora, a few neon tetra, some cardinal tetra, 8x coral red pencilfish, 1x pipefish, 12 female snakeskin guppies, 8 male snakeskin guppies, a host of shrimp (mix of red cherry, snowball, sakura and some tiny little brown and white striped ones) and a single frog. Oh, and Boris the Mighty, who is an unidentified big black shrimp who rules the tank. I think that is/was everyone.
Okay so the problem; I'm suddenly losing female guppies and pencilfish at a rate of 2-3 a day. I've had the Pencilfish for about 4 months without losing a single one and in the last 2-3 weeks I've lost 6 of them. The female guppies are now down to 6, too.
Over christmas (I was away and had housesitters) the tank got a case of whitespot which was entirely limited to the Cardinal Tetra. I got back and went out immediately, bought medicine and applied it. One fish was too far gone, unfortunately, but everyone else survived and the whitespot when away.
One of the male guppies was a bit pale around this time and stayed so for several weeks before suddenly ballooning up. After another week it was clear he had dropsy, and he soon passed.
Nothing happened for a couple of weeks, at which point I introduced the first 4 of the female guppies. Amittedly I made the mistake of forgetting to ask if they were female at the time. They were harassed mercilessly by the remaining male guppies, little sex hounds that they are. I also added two pipefish, though I found one dead a few days later.
I was intending to go and get more females to balance them out (research says 2:1 female to male will be best) but I found a couple of the female guppies had contracted white spot. Medicine cleared it up overnight.
Unfortunately at the same time a Cardinal swelled up with dropsy and passed.
A week went by without problems, other than the female guppies getting harassed, so I went and picked up some more female guppies, eight (all the shop had left) to balance it to 12:7 female to male.
This is when my nightmare really began.
One new female was a bit skinny and became lethargic, and she died that same evening. I noticed some pale patches on some of the others and used my trusty medicine again. Obviously that hasn't worked. Since then the fish won't stop dying and I can't understand why! They aren't dying in the same manner, even, so I don't know if it's one problem or multiple problems or an underlying stress problem or or or....
I do my water changes religiously every wednesday, 20-25% of the water, scrub the algae off the glass and hoover the gravel. The only blip on my radar is that I got a reading for Ammonia on Friday last week. I use a Nutrafin liquid test kit and its Ammonia test has three broad result bands; green is all good, orange is too high, red is emergency. My reading was low in the orange, though I forgot to note down the exact PPM. The test kit said I needed to get a product to take care of it (nutrafin cycle, its like prime etc that makes water safe but also bolsters the bacteria for the filter and has fish de-stress stuff). I immediately went out and got that and added the correct amount. This was the first time EVER that I saw Ammonia in anything but the tiniest trace amount. By Saturday morning it was back to non existent.
Just this minute done a full test and results are: PH 7.0, Ammonia 0, Nitrate 5-7ppm, Nitrite 0, temp 26.0c.
I'm not exactly an experienced fishmeister and my first port of call is always google and sites like these. From the most recent symptoms (on friday) I concluded my best bet was an internal bacteria medicine which I purchased and administered.
Manner of death and symptoms have been so varied that I'm just lost. I'll try to list those that stand out:
First pecilfish to die seemed to have a cyst or something on his left underbelly with something black in its core. Found him floating upside down in the morning a few weeks ago.
A couple of the guppies that died have been lethargic, underweight (suddenly underweight, not continuosly) still seem to eat with all the others.
A couple of the guppies have lost control of swimming, partially or completely, and either hang at odd angles, bump into things or lay on the bottom helplessly.
One guppy, and this one was the most awful, had all the beautiful colour from her tail disappear until her tail was just the white bony parts. At the same time, starting at the base of her tail and gradually moving along her body, her scales lost their colour and became white and (there's no better word) crusty. It looked almost like a fish that'd been left in the sun or something. By the time she died this had extended all the way to her dorsal fin.
By and large the Pencilfish show no symptoms or any different behaviour. I'll just turn the light on and find a dead one. Every dead pencilfish has been either floating at the top or laying on the top of the filter sponges. The guppies are more often dead on the bottom of the tank.
Behaviour in the tank as a whole hasn't really changed noticeably. At the same time as removing the Ammonia and adding the bacterial medicine I added treatment for Algae, fearing that might have been the cause (every week I have to scrape green from the glass and there is stringy green crap growing on the plants that I have to scrub). Since then the tank is very much clearer and the shrimp are a lot more active. The frog is also out and about a lot more.
Since so many pencilfish have died I am noticing the remaining three hide more, staying behind plants where they used to be all out at the front and swimming around.
I also saw earlier the pipefish having what looked very much like a seizure. He was twitching all over the place, then keeled over breathing weakly. Just when I thought he was gone he flipped over and swam off and *seems* right as rain. Googling that suggests an internal parasite worm can cause seizures in pipefish, so maybe that's that...
SO thank you for reading, and sorry it's so long. I just figure the more information I can give the better the chance of saving the rest of my fish. I hate losing even a single one.
Oh! feeding. They have flakes, twice daily, with every few days a frozen brick of either mixed gubbins (blood worms etc) or daphnia. I read recently that a pot of flake food shouldn't be used for more than a month so I tossed mine out and started a new one at the same time as adding the second batch of guppies.
SO.... cautiously optimistic someone might have the tiniest bit of light to shed....
Edit: Oh. One of the Pencilfish had pop eye before he died too.
