Fish At Top Of Tank Gasping For Air

[fishyfriendz]

Hi fishyfriendz and welcome to TFF!

Was that a typo up in your initial post re the stats? It seems to say:
ammonia 0.0ppm (via Nutrafin test)
nitrate(NO3) 0ppm
nitrite(NO2) 0.20ppm

Did you mean the NO2 and NO3 that way or was it switched around?

At 11 weeks (77 days) of fish-in cycling, we'd expect the biofilter to be reasonably mature but sometimes we do not see them really fully clearing to zero until past 80 days, so if you are really getting a trace of nitrite(NO2) still, then it could be you are still in a fish-in cycling situation. Even traces of nitrite will stress fish, since its giving them nerve damage.

All of this of course hinges on your answers above but if indeed we're still seeing traces of nitrite then it might suggest we'd want the gravel-clean-water-changes to be larger and/or more frequent for a while longer.

Note that all the advice above from Truck and Fishyfeet is excellent too, about the surface movement and all (agree with all of it.) They are more experienced than me and so may be seeing some things I'm not.

~~waterdrop~~

Hi!


You have the readings correct, however my ammonia and nitrate are nutrafin and my nitrite is API. I didnt exactly have a fish in cycle...I started the cycle with terta safe start, with no fish. Then after 11 days I tested and all was fine so added a molly and a guppy and two otos....then ended up with 3 uninvited mollies. Then I had a spike of well, just about everything and did daily water changes and added amquel plus.

Guppy died, and so stepped up testing. After week 9 all was settled, 0 on all tests for a week. I added a two more guppies, then a week later a molly and two endlers. Then I realised I had a maternity tank! The fish are fine now, are all over tank and fry are everywhere. But any advice is appreciated. Also the api nitrite is reading between the blue and purple, so I interpreted that as .20.

 

[waterdrop]

Yes, that's a classic non-cycle. The tetra safe start does nothing and trying to handle ammonia with a conditioner doesn't work because the helpful effect they have only lasts about 24 hours, so its not really as helpful as the needed daily large water change during fish-in cycling. But most of that should be over now.

Its hard to tell from the evidence whether you're still in the tail-end of the fishless cycling (ie. the colony sizes of the two species of bacteria we need to grow are still not quite big enough but have enough room to grow) or whether the filter might not be quite large enough (ie. the biomedia of the filter is not quite spacious enough for enough bacteria to grow) or whether you are just having a mini-cycle because the fry have increased your bioload and the bacteria haven't caught up yet. That last one may be the most likely and certainly is the most hopeful. The way to proceed with that is to simply perform somewhat larger and more frequent water changes than usual, the goal being to never let those nitrate traces get above 0.25ppm. The water changes need to be performed with good technique: dose a good conditioner (to remove chlorine or chloramines) at 1.5x to 2x but not more than 2x, and roughly temperature match the return water (your hand is good enough for this.))

~~waterdrop~~