Extremely Cloudy, Dirty Water...

[WillyRBeek]

I noticed the water in my community tank was looking a little cloudy, and since it had been 4 or 5 days since my last water change I figured I would do one. Well, imagine my surprise when I got out my gravel pump and found out everywhere I pumped the gravel, I was greeted with enormous, brown clouds of crap...Now, i'm not talking about the usual little cloud you get here and there, i'm talking the giant, thick brown cloud you get when you've missed a spot for a month or two...Now, imagine it was like that EVERYWHERE...What is going on? I keep very up to date on my water changes(20% every 3-5 days), so it's not an issue of neglect, and I haven't been feeding them any more then I usually do, and nobody else has been feeding them...The tank isn't overstocked: 25 Gallon Tank with 5 neon tetras, 6 corys, 3 platys 1 molly, 1 dwarf gourami and 1 BN plec, and it shouldn't be an issue with the filter(I gave it a complete cleaning last month)...So what's going on here? Why's my tank all of a sudden so insanely dirty?

I ended up doing a 40% water change, and cleaning out basically the entire bottom of the tank, but the water is still quite cloudy.

Any ideas?

 

[WILDER]

Plecs are massive waste producers.
When I had plecs the water would be really brown when I was doing my weekly gravel vac.
Plus it pongs lol

 

[WillyRBeek]

Plecs are massive waste producers.
When I had plecs the water would be really brown when I was doing my weekly gravel vac.
Plus it pongs lol

Ya plecs are quite messy, but there's no possible way that one pleco could account for the kind of mess i'm talking about in a period of just a couple of days...

 

[AdAndrews]

have you disturbed the substrate and so brought up all the poo from months gone by??

 

[WillyRBeek]

have you disturbed the substrate and so brought up all the poo from months gone by??

I haven't done anything out of the ordinary in the tank, plus when I do my water changes I do a pretty good job of getting all the crap that's sunken down into the gravel, so there shouldn't be much down there anyway...