dlwn88
Aquarium Advice Activist
Hey Everyone,
There's some great stuff on here, it has helped me out a lot so far. For the most part even though I'm somewhat new, I'm more confident in what I'm doing then the day I bought everything to get started, except I've run into one problem recently.
My tank has been running for almost two weeks now, started off with a two clownfish only after a couple days of running the tank (I know, bad, usually I do my research before but I was at Petco when I decided I wanted to do this, just got my first apartment so I've been wanting to do something cool like this) Anyways, I did a lot of research and not to my surprise one of them died, I think it was the initial spike in ammonia. The other one has been just fine though. The cycle obviously wasn’t there but I at least made sure the salinity, water temp, pH, etc were good to go.
Not long after the clownfish died, my girlfriend added a black damsel, which was doing just perfectly fine for about 4 or 5 days until this morning when I found it dead on the bottom. I did some readings and noticed that the ammonia is still there but it appears to be declining, with nitrite now showing up. Is this what killed the Damsel? Isn’t it easier for them to adapt to harder conditions then clownfish? Also to, still waiting for nitrates to show up, but how much is too much? I found articles saying that nitrates can be very bad, which doesn’t make sense to me after reading several nitrogen cycle articles, I thought that's the good part.
Sorry for all the questions, just want to do things right. Clownfish is in a 20 gallon tank by itself with 12 pounds live rock, two snails, ammonia is a bit less then 2 /ppm now and I forget exactly where the nitrite level is at but it’s not extremely high, and the clownfish appears to be doing really well and I can tell it's growing.
I realized to get into this moreI need something bigger so I have a 50 gallon now, but it's running on it's own with no fish till the cycle is complete
Thanks,
David
There's some great stuff on here, it has helped me out a lot so far. For the most part even though I'm somewhat new, I'm more confident in what I'm doing then the day I bought everything to get started, except I've run into one problem recently.
My tank has been running for almost two weeks now, started off with a two clownfish only after a couple days of running the tank (I know, bad, usually I do my research before but I was at Petco when I decided I wanted to do this, just got my first apartment so I've been wanting to do something cool like this) Anyways, I did a lot of research and not to my surprise one of them died, I think it was the initial spike in ammonia. The other one has been just fine though. The cycle obviously wasn’t there but I at least made sure the salinity, water temp, pH, etc were good to go.
Not long after the clownfish died, my girlfriend added a black damsel, which was doing just perfectly fine for about 4 or 5 days until this morning when I found it dead on the bottom. I did some readings and noticed that the ammonia is still there but it appears to be declining, with nitrite now showing up. Is this what killed the Damsel? Isn’t it easier for them to adapt to harder conditions then clownfish? Also to, still waiting for nitrates to show up, but how much is too much? I found articles saying that nitrates can be very bad, which doesn’t make sense to me after reading several nitrogen cycle articles, I thought that's the good part.
Sorry for all the questions, just want to do things right. Clownfish is in a 20 gallon tank by itself with 12 pounds live rock, two snails, ammonia is a bit less then 2 /ppm now and I forget exactly where the nitrite level is at but it’s not extremely high, and the clownfish appears to be doing really well and I can tell it's growing.
I realized to get into this moreI need something bigger so I have a 50 gallon now, but it's running on it's own with no fish till the cycle is complete
Thanks,
David