Help Please . . . ?

[jess27]

Hi,

We have a furry white substance on our heater suckers/holder things? We have read about lime scale but not sure that is it. The substance we have in our tank is soft and slimy and is easily wiped off but appears over the week.

Our tank is three weeks old and we built it up gradually finally adding some fish last week (guppies, tetras and a sucking loach). We have tested the environment each week and the tests (PH, Amonia etc) come back fine.

Can you give any advice as to what the white stuff is, the fish appear to be fine and the white stuff is nowhere else?

Many thanks

 

[waterdrop]

Hi there Jess and welcome to the forums

The whitish stuff you are seeing on the suction cups is called "biofilm" and is normal and perfectly harmless. Biofilm is a bacterial secretion that allows the bacteria to form a structure and stay in one place, usually where they've found nutritional sources, so they've reproduced more. We each have much larger amounts of biofilm in our gut than an aquarium has! In fact, biofilms were recently in the science news because a team has newly speculated that the purpose of the human appendix is to store extra amounts of biofilm in readiness for large attacks of disease!

OK, enough with the harmless biofilm (which can and should be easily wiped off during weekly maintenance.) What's a bigger concern is that you've got yourself in a situation that we call a "Fish-In" cycle, and at 3 weeks you've probably about used up your grace period and may be about to start having trouble with your fish. Are you familiar with the Nitrogen Cycle and the various processes of "cycling" a tank?

Since you've joined up and made an ID here, would you like help from the members with this important process? If so, what is your tank size? Do you own a liquid-reagent based test kit or are you still taking your water in to be tested at the LFS(local fish shop)? How many of what species of fish exactly? If you're getting test results from the LFS, what are the numbers, exactly, for Ammonia, Nitrite(NO2) and pH?

These and other answers can help the members get started helping you. Good Luck!

~~waterdrop~~