Newbie Needing Help And Advice Please!

[B13]

Hi all!!

I'm v. new to fish keeping and because I'm a. a "worry wart" and b. want to do this properly, I've got a few questions/concerns that I'd like advice on, please!!



Basically, I 'inherited' a 1' x 3' x 15", 83 litre tank, I put the water in about 2 months ago, have got a super-duper filter/pump doing it's job nicely and the chemical tests have all been within tolerance (that said, I'm gonna do a 20% water change in a couple of day's time...)

OK...

I've had six Zebra Danios in there which - apart from trying to eat me out of house and home - are doing very well.

On Sunday, I bought (from a reputable aquarium stockist in a nearby garden centre) 2 Suckermouth Catfish (I was told they grow to only 6cms... ...er... I think not, but that's the joy of Saturday Staff, eh?) , 2 Siamese Flying Foxes (one of which I had to return because it had a gash down it's side, was letharic and then went black!!) and 6 Coolie Loaches.

One of the catfish is very dull in colouration and it's skin has a 'milky' appearance in places. It's also not as active as it's pretty, chocolate brown spotty tankmate. Typically, when I went to get a picture this morning, the little beggar was hiding... What would cause a grey-ish milky appearance? It's not fuzzy, so it (to me at least!) doesn't appear to be a fungus. Is it stress due to the move or something more worrying. Is there anything i can do to help it? Any medication/tonic I could buy?

I was given some aquarium salt with the tank and have been told this is a good thing to add if something is amiss, but obviously, I'm not going to try anything I'm not 100% sure of and besides which, I wouldn't know the right dosage anyway!

I've had a look in my tropical fish books and can't find much help...

Any ideas anyone?

One of the Coolie Loaches also has some grey patches on it's skin, but this (to my untrained eye!) looks like scar tissue. Another one is swimming about at 3000mph and appears to be 'panting'. Again, any ideas? Or is the second one merely hyper-active?

And lastly, are Zebra Danios reknowned piglets? My lot eat everything and anything with great gusto - even the tablet-shaped, sinking food pellets that are meant for the bottom feeders. The females in particular look like straightened out commas! I only feed them a small pinch in the morning and that goes in about 2 minutes. The tablets, I've put in at night at 'lights out' - but they gobble them down too. At this rate, I may be the only fish keeper in the world to have spherical danios...

Lastly, when I do a water change, (I've had the water standing in buckets since Saturday and I'll be adding Tap Safe to it) 20% of room temperature water all at once seems to me like it may well be one hell of a shock temperature-wise to the fish - or are they OK with that?

(Sorry for all the questions, but like I said, I'm new to fish-keeping and want to do this right!)

 

[Miss Wiggle]

well hello, welcome to the forum and to the hobby

don't worry about asking a million questions, the only silly question is the one that you don't ask so just fire away!!

Right, the first thing to ascertain is your level of knowledge of the water parameters, keeping the water clean is the most important thing in fishkeeping and if you don't understand what the different parameters are and how the filter works then you've no hope in hell of getting this right! So to start off with, what test kit are you using, is it test strips or liquid and what is the make of it? Secondly run a test of the water in the tank now and also run a test of the water out of your tap, post both sets of results up here and we'll then tell you if ther'es anything wrong. When you post them us give us the actual numbers rather than just 'fine' or whatever. What's fine for one fish is not necessarily fine for another species.

Secondly, if I talk about cycling the filter and about the 'good' bacteria that live in the filter, is this all new to you or do you know what I'm on about?! If it's new then start off by reading the link in my signature called 'whats cycling' which explains a bit more to you. Then post back with any questions you have.

Also can you describe your regular maintenance routine, how often do you do water changes, do you clean the gravel, do you clean the filter media and how do you do this?

Do you know what species the suckermouth catfish are? There are literally hundreds of species that could go by this name, if you don't know then can you please post a picture up or give us the best description of them as possible and then we'll see if we can work out what they are.

We need a bit more info before we can make a diagnosis, the info above is a good start, we'll come onto some more questions when we know that info.

All fish would have you believed that they are starved constantly, danio's are also very very active fish so I'm not at all surprised by the description. Just be careful not to overfeed, fish can comfortably go for 2 weeks without food so don't panic about them not getting enough!

You dont need to get the water up to temp, from the tap is fine! A 30% water change with normal from the tap temp water will not give a drop of more than 2oC. What do you think happens in the wild when it rains Fish can cope with this easily, no need to get it up to room temp. Just run buckets from the tap, add dechlor and pop it into the tank.

 

[B13]

Hi Miss Wiggle!

The test kit is something the knowledgable chap at the fish shop recommended (i.e not the Saturday Staffer!) It's an Interpet Master Pond Test Kit- which (to me at least!) seems to be a pretty comprehensive one with 4 phials + tablets for pH, ammonia, Nitrate and Nitrite - and a good colour chart to match against.

Even if it is for ponds and I have a tank!



The last test I did (Thursday) came up with:

Broad Range: 8.5
Total ammonia at 25ºc: 0.1
Nitrate: 0

From the chart and info sheet, that all seemed to be within normal parameters (but as you said, what's 'normal' for some may be 'not-very-nice-at-all' for others!)

Unfortunately, I'm at work right now, so can't give a more up-to-date one...


I don't know what you mean by 'cycling' the filter, but when it comes to the bacteria in it, all I know is that when I change the carbon foam inside the filter, I must clean the white filter in tank water and not tap water because of all the good bacteria that will have become established in it. (I've got an Interpet PF3 internal filter)


I haven't done a water change yet as I've only had the tank going for about 6 weeks (The first 4 weeks were without fish and only had doses of StressZyme added, as advised.) The gravel is clean, but again, this week, I'll be giving it a good stir-up and a siphon. I'll be removing dead veg as-and-when I see any. Next on the list is the filter foam change/clean (replacement foams are on order!)

I plan to siphon/clean the gravel once a week (as well as a chemical test), do a water change once a month and 'do' the filter every 2 months (again, as advised)


The catfish are 'suckermouth catfish' according to one of my fish books, but I reckon it's proper name is Hypostomus plecostomus.

This is a pic of the healthy one in my tank:

I forgot to mention that the fish with the grey patches has both his dorsal and tail fin clamped close to it's body at rest. And it rests a lot... The coolie with the grey patches is swimming around quite happily and eating well.

 

[chesterscot]

to tff youll find loads of info on here and helpfull ppl to i see miss wiggles helping you shes a star so listen up lol
regards scot

 

[B13]

Hee!!


Hi Scott!!

I'm all ears! And I'm now off to read Miss Wiggle's 'What's Cycling' info (...although as a member of a local cycle club, I may get confused!!!)

 

[chesterscot]

its a good read thatll answer a few questions for ya?
if ya get stuck just start a post and someone will help
regards scot

 

[Miss Wiggle]

ok so good start, we're getting somewhere!

I'm not familiar with that test kit, what I will say is that all test kits are not born equal. The accuracy of some test kits is a valid query. I'll wait for someone to pop up with experience of this test kit and let us know if it's any good or not. We'll ask in the pond section if no one here knows in the not too distant future.

So assuming that the test kit is accurate then I can immediately tell you what the problem(s) are, or at least what the cause of them is if not a diagnosis of the specific problem. 0.1ppm of ammonia is bad news, this should always be 0, even small amounts like this can be lethal to your fish and this will be why the fish are suffering. You definately need to read the link called 'whats cycling', this will explain to you what's happening and what you need to do.

Now you have the added problem of a very very high pH, firstly some of the fish will not be happy with a pH this high, but more worryingly the pH of the water has an effect on the toxicity of ammonia. The higher the pH is the worst the effects of the ammonia will be, so your little bit of ammonia is going to be a serious problem with a pH that high.

Test the tank and the tap water when you get home tonight and post the readings up here for a more up to date look at things. Does the test kit also test for nitrite?

The water in the tank is highly toxic to fish at the moment, so whatever disease problems you have they are almost certainly caused by the poor water, so step 1 is to eliminate the cause, what you should do is start testing the water every day, every day that you get any reading for ammonia or nitrite other than 0 you do a water change to get it down to 0. You can do as many water changes as needs be, start out with a 50% water change, leave it 1 hour afterwards and then test the water again, if it's not down to 0 then do another change and keep going until they get down to 0. This may mean daily water changes for a few weeks while the tank cycles.

The plec should be returned to the fish shop, it's going to reach 18" easily as an adult and your tank is nowhere big enough to house it.

There's also a link in my signature called 'weekly maintenance' have a read through that and it'll tell you what to do weekly.

For now do not touch the filter unless the flow rate severely drops. I'll give you some more links about filter media later and what to do with it, but you've enough to learn and do getting the water in order so lets take one thing at a time! For now, get some water changes done and just leave the filter be. We also need to work out why the pH is so high, first thing is to see what the tap water reading is though so we'll talk about that a bit more later.

 

[B13]

Cool!!

I'll do a water change tonight (or earlier if I can escape from work!) and re-test. (Is it worth getting a chemical 're-balancer' as an emergency measure?) I'll also do a test on the tap water.

(Funnily enough, when I check the colour of the broad range against one colour chart, it comes out at 7.5, but on the Interpet kit, it's 8.5. OK, I know that print can't be guaranteed as 100% accurate, but it just goes to show how two different kits can give two different results...)

I'll just clarify that the sick fish are two of the fish who I bought on the weekend and they looked a bit poorly when I put them in the tank (hence the reason why I returned the Siamese Flying Fox that had the gash in his side), the rest of my fish are OK. That said, I'm still gonna be taking your advice!! I might take a sample of water to the aquarium stockist to get them to double-check. And I'll take the plec back...

But a HUGE thank you for your advice!!! I'll report back once I've done what you advised.

THANK YOU!!!!!

 

[Miss Wiggle]

nah, don't bother with any chemicals except for dechlorinator.

there's a whole lot of aquarium products out there with so many claims you wouldn't be surprised if they said they cured Cancer as well. Unfortunately the vast majority of them are snake oil and will do absolutely nothing, worse still some of them disrupt the natural chemical processes and can muck things up.

At this moment I would just concentrate on getting the water right. If you can do then try to take a picture of the poorly fish, it'd be much easier for us to diagnose based on that. As I'm sure you can imagine making a diagnosis over the internet is tricky at the best of times, it's very hard to describe illnesses, and as such it's very hard from the description to tell whats actually wrong in a lot of cases!!

when you say you're comparing against other colour charts, do you mean other charts from different makes of test kit? If so then you can't trust it, the reagents used give different colours sometimes so you need to just read it against the test kit that you have.

By all means ask a fish shop to test the water as well, but don't ask for advice, fish shops are notoriously bad for just thinking of the business and they're likely to sell you a load of old rubbish that you don't need. Sad but it's true, one of the forum members here did a little test, he mixed up some water to toxic levels and took it to the lfs to test and asked their opinion, they tried to sell him something for his pH which didn't need adjusting and the product is known to be dodgy anyway and said that some of the other levels were absolutely fine when they clearly weren't. So just take the sample of water in and write down what the results are and leave it at that!!

When you say you inherited the tank, can we be clear on exactly what happened. What state was the tank in before it came to you? Did it have fish in or not, if not did it have water in, did it have fish in recently and if so then how recently? When you set it up did you use new filter media or the existing stuff? Did you set it up with water straight away or did everything dry out? In the 4 weeks before you got the new fish did you add anything other than stress zyme to the tank? Any fish food or anything like that?

 

[B13]

Hee!!


I can't say that I'm surprised when you say that what they try and sell in the shops is mostly next to useless: it's like the old saying, "Why do pet food companies exist? To sell pet food!" - which in the case of the well-known-brand-that-starts-with-a-T - is probably true!

My Dad used to keep fish when I was a kid and they only got fed once a day. So when I read things like "Feed these flakes three times a day" I kinda raise an eyebrow... If I fed my gutty danio lot three times a day, I'd have a mucky tank, yucky water and fat fish... Even the bloke in the shop said that the manufacturers only put that on the packaging to sell more fish food!!

(I ride horses and it really makes me chuckle at what total and utter JUNK the feed manufacturers say you MUST feed your horse. Horses evolved to eat grasses and a bit of browse - and their digestive systems are best suited to just that. Fancy foods, must-have supplements and this-that-and-the-other-magic-powders-and-potions are all products of an imaginative marketing dept aimed at people's insecurities and their wallets!!)

*wink*

But yes, I compared the water in the phial against the chart first on the Interpet chart and then from the box of an old Tetra test kit which came with the tank. I haven't used the old test kit as I know how chemicals can degrade over time and can therefore give inaccurate results - but it was interesting to see how two brands can give two differing results!


With regards to the tank, I got it from a friend's dad who had been keeping fish for years. I think he gave up about 5 years ago, so that tank had been in storage (i.e. a loft!) before it came to me. So it was dry.

The tank itself is in very good nick: clean, no leaks, etc. Filter-wise, I bought the Interpet PF3 new and was advised to add StressZyme to kick-start the bacteria and not to add any fish for at least two weeks (so I left it for four with just the filter running) and nope, I didn't add anything else to it before I got the fish.

The only items I re-used from my friend's dad's set-up was the gravel and a couple of tank ornaments (a rockface and a ruined stone castle!)

I got the danios first and for all the time that they have been in there, they have been (and are) perfectly fine and happy. Well, their scales are shiney and brightly coloured, they are active and - like I said - their eating like piglets...



I'll see if I can get a photo of the catfish tonight...

 

[Miss Wiggle]

ah OK, it's just if it had fish in recently or just before the move and had all been kept wet then there may have been some of our lovely good bacteria still alive to help out with your water quality.

however 5 years dry in a loft is a long time to ask them to survive for!!!

Glad you're open to the possibility that fish shops and manufacturers may not always be quite right. You'd be amazed sometimes how hard it is to convince people that the 15 yr old saturday boy in their LFS is not a qualified marine biologist with an encyclopedic knowledge of all fish species, products etc etc. There's a lot of very clever and dedicated hobbyists on this forum who would dearly love to work in a fish shop, but can't afford to because of the wages. You get what you pay for!

Now that's not to say that there are no decent employee's or that every 15 year old knows nothing. However it is wise to exercise a little caution with their advise until you know enough yourself to be able to identify the staff who know their stuff!

 

[B13]

Hee!!

Like the Saturday Lad who told me on Saturday that the plecs would only grow to 6cms (I have to admit I raised an eyebrow then coz I was thinking, "I'm SURE those are the buggers who grow to 20 inches...") and then said that I have to put TEN feed pellets in per night for them...

I eventually 'bargained' him down to five and in the end only put in one (...which the danios promptly ate...)




Mind you, I got another Saturday Lad on the till... who forgot to charge me for m'fish!!



...


At the moment, I'm Googling to see if I can find a picture online to describe what the milky colouration on the plec looks like. It doesn't look like Velvet cos there's no 'fuzz', it's just a huge patch of grey/milky colouration and clamped dorsal and tail fin. When it does swim, it's fine, the fins are up - but mostly, it's lethargic.

Can lethargy and/or discolouration be caused by the stress of being moved from the shop tank to my tank via a car drive?(I'm still gonna do the water changes BTW!!)

 

[Miss Wiggle]

the journey home will not have stressed it out (fish are shipped into the country from the far east and sometimes spend 48 hrs+ in a little fish bag just like the one you took your fish home in). the transfer into water with ammonia in it and a pH through the roof will have done so though.

 

[Miss Wiggle]

just FYI - I posted up in the pond section to see if your test kit is any good, thought i'd link from here for continuity of discussions

http/www.fishforums.net/index.php?showtopic=262132

 

[B13]

Ooo!!

Thank you, I'll go have a look!!



...


*two minutes later*

Wow... it seems like my test kit may not be that accurate... Hmmmmm... a trip to the shop is on the cards, methinks.

Still gonna change the water tho'...