3 Week Old Tank - Fish Are Rapidly Dying!

[doron]

Hi all,

I'm after some advice if possible.

I recently purchased a Fluvel 180 Litre Vicenza aquarium. I filled the tank as per instructed by the shop I bought it from (i.e. put the right amount of start safe etc in, turned filter on etc...)

I left the tank to settle for exactly a week and went back to the shop to purchase some fish. I took a sample of aquarium water, which tested out fine...

After consulting with the shop, I purchased 14 mixed guppies as these would be ideal first fish in my aquarium..

After about 3 days of the fish being in the tank, there had been a steady procession of fish dying so I took another water sample back to the shop last night...That sample also tested out fine, the man in the shop said it was a little high but nothing to worry about.

I changed 25% of the water last night (as per instructed) but I still lost 2 fish this morning..

In a week, I've started with a new tank of 14 guppies and now I'm down to only 6..

The purpose of my topic is that if the water has been as fine, why am I losing fish so rapidly

I've got my filter on full, temp is always between 78-79F, lights on the recommend amount of time...

I also took some "dead" fish with me back to the shop to check for diseases and they couldn't spot anything wrong....

Is it reasonable to except a few to die with it being a new tank set up??

I'm at a loss as to why the fish keep dying, any pointers would be much appreciated...

 

[aly_starh]

Hi all,

I'm after some advice if possible.

I recently purchased a Fluvel 180 Litre Vicenza aquarium. I filled the tank as per instructed by the shop I bought it from (i.e. put the right amount of start safe etc in, turned filter on etc...)
"start safe"- bacteria in a bottle, imo a gimmak, way for LFS to get money

I left the tank to settle for exactly a week and went back to the shop to purchase some fish. I took a sample of aquarium water, which tested out fine...
Tank is not cycled

After consulting with the shop, I purchased 14 mixed guppies as these would be ideal first fish in my aquarium..
Way too much fish for the first load, and even more so, your tank was not cycled
After about 3 days of the fish being in the tank, there had been a steady procession of fish dying so I took another water sample back to the shop last night...That sample also tested out fine, the man in the shop said it was a little high but nothing to worry about.
Ammonia poisening most likely, the man should have told you what it was high in, then again, he wont have because its his fault. Too much bio-load added at the time, that the filter was not able to cope

I changed 25% of the water last night (as per instructed) but I still lost 2 fish this morning..

In a week, I've started with a new tank of 14 guppies and now I'm down to only 6..

The purpose of my topic is that if the water has been as fine, why am I losing fish so rapidly

I've got my filter on full, temp is always between 78-79F, lights on the recommend amount of time...

I also took some "dead" fish with me back to the shop to check for diseases and they couldn't spot anything wrong....

Is it reasonable to except a few to die with it being a new tank set up??

I'm at a loss as to why the fish keep dying, any pointers would be much appreciated...

Your tank is no way near cycled for the fish. Dont buy anymore, until its cycled.
So its time to cycle it, there are two ways to go about this, Fish-In or Fish-less.
http/www.fishforums.net/index.php?showtopic=141944
That should help, i wouls also reccommend you buy your own test kits so you know whath the exact readings are.
Hope that helped

 

[Inchworm]

Hi doron

Welcome to the forum!

As betta_246 mentioned, there is a process your thank has to go through to become established and be a safe environment for your fish. I'll move your thread over to the New to the Hobby section where our members will be happy to help you through it. Feel free to ask all the questions you need to.

 

[kiriyama]

Hi , sorry you got off to a bad start. There are loads of threads on here about "cycling" your filter. You are now doing what is called a fish in cycle. Check out the threads they will be very helpful. However don't buy any more fish for a while and unfortunatly it sounds like the shop has just made some axtra cash through bad advice , it happened to me also , when I got my tank they sold me loads of fish in the first few weeks , not pretty and not clever.
Read the threads and will get sorted , it will get better from here , good luck and welcome to the forum.......

 

[OldMan47]

Welcome to the forum Doron.
I am going to agree with most of the other posters here but try to make a difference. You are in a fish-in cycle and have water that has degraded so far it is killing fish. As an emergency measure, a very large water change, more like 75% than 25%, is in order. You may be surprised to see how much better the fish look after just one change like that. To do that change, make sure you unplug the heater and filter before you start so they don't try to run while they are dry. A dry heater is one that will burn up fast and a dry filter pump will have the impeller self destruct in not very many minutes. When adding the water back into the tank, make sure you have used a dechlorinator, per the package instructions, to remove chlorine from the new water. You also want the new water to temperature match the existing water in the tank to avoid giving the fish a temperature shock. You can tell well enough on the temperature by using your hand to compare the temperatures. A cup of tank water next to where you are filling the bucket will let you compare them.
Once you get beyond the emergency water change, you need to start looking for a good liquid type water testing kit, the kind with the little test tubes. You need to be able to measure at least ammonia, pH and nitrites. I find the API freshwater master kit is fairly good but there are others made by other manufacturers. Once you can test our own water, the advice in the fish-in cycle thread will get you on the right road to getting your tank ready for more fish. There is a link to that thread in my signature area because so many people arrive here without having cycled their tanks. Until you get that kit and can start testing, you need to do daily water changes of about 30% or more, based on your remaining stock level, to keep it fairly safe for the fish. It can easily take a month or even two to get the tank cycled to where a weekly small water change is enough, but it will give you lots of good practice doing water changes in the mean time.

 

[Gustavo]

Get your own test kit, I wouldn't trust the fish store employees as far as I can trow them. They want your $$$ and nothing else.

 

[waterdrop]

Yes, agree with OM47. His post should get you going in the right direction.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[Skunkfu]

Its crazy how LFS's know s**t about fish keeping. Before we got our first tank, i was reading up these forums, and people kept saying "Dont trust your LFS, most of the time they know nothing and they only after your $$$" and i kept saying to myself "No it cant be true, they are "shop","Fishkeepers" they must know everything!"

Once my tank was cycled, i went to get some fish from my LFS and told them that i used household amonia to cycle my tank... they were confused what i was talking about. This woman was looking at me like i was crazy, then she was confused why i done 80% water change after finishing my cycle and said it will be bad for the fish. She was coming with some random crap about eveything, its unbelievable!

 

[arobinson1984]

Its crazy how LFS's know s**t about fish keeping. Before we got our first tank, i was reading up these forums, and people kept saying "Dont trust your LFS, most of the time they know nothing and they only after your $$$" and i kept saying to myself "No it cant be true, they are "shop","Fishkeepers" they must know everything!"

Once my tank was cycled, i went to get some fish from my LFS and told them that i used household amonia to cycle my tank... they were confused what i was talking about. This woman was looking at me like i was crazy, then she was confused why i done 80% water change after finishing my cycle and said it will be bad for the fish. She was coming with some random crap about eveything, its unbelievable!

Unfortuanately this is quite often the case. Alot of lfs basically sell fish as another 'product' to make money, some look at it in the same way you would running a shoe shop.

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good lfs out there, my local one is a family run business and has been going 35 years and I find these small family run businesses tend to be better than the large chain stores, although many owners of the family businesses that have been running years are set in their ways and many use 'old school' method hence alot of them wont have even heard of cycling, let alone fishless cycling. Years ago, the way to do it was dump a load of fish in a tank and see what happens. Now times have changed and there are methods such as cycling to provide the fish with the best possible start.

Andy

 

[waterdrop]

Its crazy how LFS's know s**t about fish keeping. Before we got our first tank, i was reading up these forums, and people kept saying "Dont trust your LFS, most of the time they know nothing and they only after your $$$" and i kept saying to myself "No it cant be true, they are "shop","Fishkeepers" they must know everything!"

Once my tank was cycled, i went to get some fish from my LFS and told them that i used household amonia to cycle my tank... they were confused what i was talking about. This woman was looking at me like i was crazy, then she was confused why i done 80% water change after finishing my cycle and said it will be bad for the fish. She was coming with some random crap about eveything, its unbelievable!

Yes, there are many very long threads here on TFF from over the years where the members have discussed the LFS Phenomenon and speculated about its origin and ongoing characteristics.

Its hard and somewhat foolish to categorize people but I tend to expect 4 types of people in a retail fish shop:
1) The Sales Worker - someone who needed a job - wildly variable whether they know the first thing about the hobby...
2) The Retailer or Manager - in larger shops you sometimes run into manager types who know much more about retail than about fish per se and might even be fishkeepers themselves with a beginner or intermediate experience with a tank, which can confuse things even further.
3) The Jaded Shop Owner - Sometimes you experience apparently long-time shop owners who for whatever reason, whether its for sales or stubborn adherence to things they decided were right years ago will firmly stick to things that active hobbyists have changed their opinion about for some time.
4) The Hobbyist Shop Owner - Here and there about the world you may run across a true hobbyist/professional running a shop who not only shares all the kind of experienced ideas you'll see here on TFF but often has all the added experience that comes with being a professional around fish and fish equipment. There are probably some TFF members in this category.

Of course there's everything in-between too. The negative aspects of the LFS Phenomenon are of course well-discussed. One of the more unusual conversations I ran across though was about the effect of the "impatient customer." The jist of it is that the vast majority of the public that comes in to a shop have no where near the patience to even listen to a reasonable explanation of what's involved in setting up a healthy fish environment, much less read a booklet or come anywhere near the dedication involved in cycling. Retailers have to be sensitive to what promotes or detracts from sales. Actually helping a potential customer to realize that fish can't be just taken home and fed, like a cat or dog, would cause this large percentage of "impatient" customers to find a way to get themselves back out the front door with nothing in hand, if they possibly could! So, as this theory goes, the retail business really evolved a fairly complicated response of certainly avoiding any telling of the truth (if they indeed knew it themselves) and instead, if and when any of them thought about it at all (not that there's much time left over for philosophy in the hand to mouth world of a small retail business!) they might justify the quick sale of fish with the thought that eventually the new beginners would "get it" or "stumble through" and at least there'd be a chance of a return customer, as opposed to one who simple walked out the door empty handed that first day.

Anyway, this discussion of the "impatient beginner customer" phenomenon was one of the more interesting contrasting ideas to the usual negative stuff we all gripe about and its stuck with me as a bit of a balancer to the times when I, like any of our dedicated hobbyists here, have a bit of mental rage over the entire subject.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[OldMan47]

Unfortunately I must agree with WD. Although we like to think of the LFS as a source of good advice, they are in business to sell fish and supplies. They are not in the advice business. When they give advice about what products you should buy, the emphasis is on the buy part, and they will suggest almost anything that sounds like it might help. They will read the label of things like bacterial boosters to you and tell you it might help a cycle. I can't really blame the store owners and managers, they are in the business of selling pet supplies and you have come to them asking what they would like them to sell you. When I go to a hardware store, I do not listen very hard to the sales staff on what to buy, instead I do my homework first and just ask the sales staff to point to the product that I have already decided to buy. The same should be the process you follow when going into a LFS. Don't ask what they can sell you for doing a water change, ask where the Prime or the gravel vacs are. They will be happy to point them out to you and get the sale completed and you will not be disappointed at the terrible advice. The hobbyist store owner is so rare that you might as well forget about ever running into them. Instead expect mostly the manager who may have beginner skills at fishkeeping but knows very well how to press the highest profit margin product on a typical newcomer. That person is found in almost any store that has survived for more than a few months. Sorry folks, in this situation we do it to ourselves. The true hobbyists go broke trying to be helpful and the purely business oriented managers make their stores survive and even thrive. The true hobbyist helps people go down the road to the store that will sell them fish for their brand new tank when he tells them they should not buy any fish yet. Most folks regard fish as an ornament in their homes, not a pet to be cherished and cared for.

 

[stelis]

the same happened to me,it seems to me most local lfs dont give a toss and
just want to sell you as much as they can.ive been doing daily water changes
to get my nitrate down.it all seems to have settled down now.definately get your
own test kit,test every day and keep changing the water 25% minimum.