Angelfish Aids? Hope Not. Help!

[daryld2004]

This started on 9/11
 
Hi Everyone,

I wanted to start out by saying I love this blog. I have been coming to this site for the past year and finally did my first post. I need major help on this one.

I am a breeder of angelfish and I have been doing this for a year now. All my angelfish fry are very healthy and always got allot of nice angelfish. But I am not sure what happen in the past few days, my system water PH went from 7.8 to 6.8. I did allot of water change and nothing seem to help. My angelfishes are starting to act weird for the past two days. They dashing around instead of swimming, most of the angelfishes stay in the corner and most of them are not eating either. I have around 200+ adults angelfish and around 200+ dime size angelfish in the system right now. I also breed bristle pleco on the same system. I have around 40 bristle nose 2 inches and around 20 adult. I also have 6 pots of live plant in my system.

Here is the break down of my system.

Temp: 80

PH: 6.4-6.8 (my water is 7.8)

Nitrite: 0

Ammonia: 0

Nitrate: 0

Water: 30g+ per day

Tank: 9-20g, 1 30g, 1-75.

Filter: 60g sump with K1 media and 100 micron filter bags

Water: Straight from Tap, I have a whole house filter

Feeding: twice a day

Angelfish: DD Black, Silver, Gold veil, Full coverage Koi veil

Pleco: Dragon dragon bristle, red BN, Albino BN, Calico BN, one 12' common pleco.

Water volume: 420 gallons of water

The weird thing is I have 4 separate tank from this system:

20g with 4 baby discus, I change 100% water a day, again straight from tap

55g with 50 angelfish 50 cents + size

110 adult discus tank. I use a drip system for this tank and drip 1g of water per hour. Again straight from the tap.

All of this tank use water from the tap too and all the PH on these are at 7.8. I don’t understand why my breeding system PH drop to 6.4 to 6.8 and most of my angelfish look really strange. Again it just happen two days now.

At the moment I am dripping 20g+ of tap water to the system per hour. I will let you run until tomorrow and test out the PH again. That should do a 200g+ of water by the morning.

This morning the PH went back up to 7.8 but my angel still look very stress.

Update on 9/12 Friday:
someone send me this link, good info but I didn't use salt nor fertilizer for my plant in my system. http/www.myaquariumclub.com/freshwater-tank-and-a- phosphate-problem-7170.html

UPDATE ON 9/12 Friday Night:

I did a large of water change for the past 3 days and it doesn't seem to help at all. All of my angelfishes starting to show stress even my dime size. They start to eat less and less each day. My breeder size angelfish stop eat completely for 3 days now. I check the PH again last night and went back to 7.2. I did another 40+ gallons waters change instantly. Test the water again this morning and still at 7.2.

I moved three of my angelfish out of this system to one of my outgrow 55g tank. I have around 50 angelfish in there already. After I moved these three in there, they seem to be allot better and swim calmly instead of dashing around like the rest of my angelfish in my main system.

My baby bristlenose pleco are very active. Whatever happen in my system doesn't seem to bother them at all. I brought some ghost and put them in the system 2 days again and they seemed to do fine too.

I have some daphnia and I will put them in the system tonight and see if they will survive. I know daphnia are extremely sensitive to bad water. I need help on this one guy. I have around 100+ angelfish in this system and really dont want to see them dying off. I also increase the heat from 79 to 82.

UPDATE ON 9/13 Saturday night:
Daphnia are in the tank. Did another 50+ gallons of water changed. Temperature increase seem to help my dime size baby angelfish and also increase their appetite. But my adult DD black still look the same.

UPDATE ON 9/14 Sunday Morning:
All the Daphnia seemed to doing fine so they water quality doesn't seem to be the problem. All the symptom point to Angelfish AIDS virus which I hope I am wrong.

Symptom
Clamped fins, excess slime, listless with nose pointed up slightly.

Cause: unknown. I didn't introduce any new angelfish to my system. The only thing that might have cause this are my discus. I brought 4 one inch discus a week ago but they are in a separate system. The problem is when I change their water, I let the old water float into my angelfish system. One thing I dont understand is my discus still look extremely healthy and eating like pig. I am extremely frustrated and really need some help on this.
 
UPDATE ON 9/15 Monday Morning
One of my DD black die today.  Most of the angelfish still ot eating but fortunately the dime size baby are still eating like pig but clamped fins and straight to corner after eating.  Before 9/11 they always swim around very active after I fed them.  PH in the water still not stable and dropping to 6.4 from 7.8 even after I changed 60 gallons of water last night. 

 

[Byron]

I am not much help with disease and I will not guess on that.  But I do see a couple issues which I will mention, as they may well be connected.
 
First is never use "old" fish water on different tanks.  It is conceivable that some pathogen or protozoan came in on the new discus, and this will spread with the water used in other tanks.  This is one of the problems stores on circulating systems have; disease spreads rapidly.  Aside from this, using old water is not helping the fish anyway, as the idea behind changing water is to remove old water and replace with fresh.  The tank water has various pathogens, pheromones, allomones, etc in it from fish, and should only be replaced with fresh.  The old water can go out on the garden, but not in another fish tank.  Aside from anything else, this can be highly stressful on the angelfish as they are now reading chemical signals from other fish.
 
Second issue that may be part of this is your tap water.  Do you use any water conditioner?  What you are describing could be chlorine or chloramine poisoning.  Or there could be some other substance in the tap water now that wasn't previously.  Copper, perhaps, from the plumbing?  Something added by the water authority?  These things do occur.  The fact that the fish moved to another tank recover so rapidly certainly suggests something in the water in the other tank.
 
The pH fluctuation is another issue; a change of 1 degree or more is significant, meaning from 7.8 down to 6.4 when it is fairly rapid.  I would also check the GH and KH of the tap water.
 
Byron.

 

[daryld2004]

Thanks Byron for the reply.  I think it was not a good idea to change water this way but since the discus are small, I chose this mention because all my system are automatic.  My Sump in my main system is connected to my drain and eveytime when I change the discus tank water, i also change my main system water at the same time so I dont think the old water from the discus would affect much since my main system is 400+ gallons of water.   But I do agree that some pathogen or protozoan from the new discus will go into my system.  Should have been more careful but forgot about it.  Also, I did put the LFS water into the discus tank when I brought them home, another MISTAKE right there and now I am paying for it. 
 
As for my PH drop, it drop around .4 every 12 hours anyway so I don't that affect the water.  I will change out the filter for my whole house filter tonight and see if that will improve their condition.  Also, I will remove 2 tank from my main system and see if those fishes in there will improve.

Also I never water conditioner when I did my water change.  But I did use it for the past few days and still nothing improve.