Bad Times...

[confusion]

So, I've found fishkeeping to be a learning experience. I had a few bad incidents recently:

I have some honey gold gouramis (these are pretty small adults). I was doing water changes and rearranging plants. I didn't notice, but the bottom part of the filter intake fell off. Almost at the same time I saw it was off and was quickly reaching in to put it back on, I heard an awful grinding sound in the filter. Sure enough, when I pulled the intake off, fish parts all over the inside of the filter Of all the fish I have managed to kill over the years in one way or another, this one haunts me and makes me sick to think about - not the aftermath, but I guess the sheer senselessness of it.

I have a 29G tank in my bedroom that has some platies, gouramis and angels. One of the fish had cut itself and it wasn't healing well. I had male molly from a different tank that was in a bad way from a fight with another male, so I put the molly in the 29G and added some kannaplex, which I have always had great success with. Well, over the next two days, the tank went to hell in a handbasket. At first, I thought it was a disease spreading to other fish. The angels in particular looked fine. Then, the platies and mollies started dying. I had been doing water changes furiously, and the angels kept looking at me, seeming to say: "hungry... feed me...". So, as a last ditch check, I decided to check the ammonia, and sure enough, it was about 5ppm. Kannaplex had killed my bio filter. I had used kannaplex many times over the years and have never had that problem, and the tank has been cycled for 6 months or so.

So, the lessons are:
- Watch those filter intakes, especially when you are working in the tank.
- Even if a med says it won't kill your bio filter, it may still
- Treat your fish in a hospital tank - I got lazy and killed fish
- Water change at the first sign of trouble
- Test ammonia & nitrite at first sign of trouble too - Me being lazy again.
- Don't assume that because all of your fish are not distressed that there is not a tank-wide problem.

 

[Jozlyn]

Good advice, well worth anyone new or experienced fishkeepers reading.

 

[Danno]

Things like this happen to the best of us.

 

[tetraqueen]

Good advice, well worth anyone new or experienced fishkeepers reading.

I cannot agree more ' anyone new or experienced' as sad to say we all learn from each other even mistakes happen to the most experienced.

 

[iairj84]

This just happened to me with one of my new cichlids... Don't let it get to you though!

 

[Miss Wiggle]

just to add if your medicating a tank and worried about your bacteria colony dying off to keep some live take some of the media and put it in a small cheapy internal filter and set that running in a bucket, feed it ammonia (as you would when fishless cycling) every day to keep it live, then you can keep testing the tank and if you see you bacteria colony has been nuked you can do a great big water change to get rid of the meds, add the media from the internal back to the main filter and the ammoni and nitrite should be gone pretty quickly.

more helpful advice is to always make sure you have a spare heater and filter, cos you can guarantee that when one breaks it'll be bank holiday with no shops open for 3 days and you'll be skint. So budget buying spares into the cost of setting up a tank in the first place and just keep them safe. Every fishkeeper has a heater/filter die on them at some point so you will need them!

if you can't afford to keep a spare tank then go to a garden centre and get a big garden tidy tub, it'll cost you less than £5 and hold 10-15 gallons of water so plenty enough to even hold bigish fish temporarily if your tank cracks or you need to isolate a fish (spare heater and filter come in here as well)

 

[PufferFishRule]

or find yourself a 5 gallon bucket! cant go wrong with a 5 gal bucket! thats what i use to do until i kept finding 10 gal tanks for cheap! i have 2 of em now one hospital and one community