Holiday With A Huge Price

MojoDex · May 30, 2008

ive just got back from 2 weeks in singapore yesterday, had a great time btw but paid a hefty price!

i have come home to 2 tank wipe outs and they just happend to be the malawi and the tanganyika, the 2 most exspensive tanks i have! :angry:

needless to say i am totally gutted

ive got 20 malawi cichlids left but around 15 of them cannot be more than a week old so very very small.

i have 5 brevis left from my tanganyika and 9 synodontis.

so from what was around 150 fish combined to slightly just over 30. i have lost around £1500 worth of fish but i honestly dont want to work out a real figure.

i dont really have a clue what happend because i was not here, i got a phone call 1 week ago from my mum about my malawi tank going south, my dad did a water change and got rid of all the dead fish and kept doing so for the next 3 days! then at the airport my mum called me about my tanganyika tank basically doing the same thing.

i have no clue what happend as i have said i have just spent the entire day stripping both tanks down. i find it strange that 2 tanks went when i was not here but i suppose i will never know now!

i think i am going to have another malawi tank as i really enjoyed them, but im not sure about the other tank losing the tanganyika is a huge blow i spent so much time money and effort on that tank

so i wont be doing that again they are just so exspensive.

anyway just wanted a bit of a pity party for myself :-(

minxfishy · May 30, 2008

That sucks, Im sorry for your losses.

iankent · May 30, 2008

sorry to hear the bad news

good luck with the new setup though!

england · May 30, 2008

dang every fishkeepers worst nightmare :crazy:

sorry for you loses mate!!! hope you atleast had a good holiday?

MojoDex · May 30, 2008

oh yea had a great holiday

but yea its a nightmare, at least i had time to prepare myself though, but just so gutting when your stripping a tank down and dead fish are coming out of everything u touch :-(

fourthtimelucky · May 30, 2008

Poor you, that sounds awful. :-(

Dunno what it is about leaving other people in charge but that's ALWAYS when things go wrong...

MojoDex · May 30, 2008

i suspect alot of over feeding but theres no way of knowing now.

no point getting angry whats done is done i suppose, next time i go away fish will have to go hungry for a week or 2 lol

Colin_T · May 30, 2008

I would say you lost a fish or someone put too much food in the tank and it produced ammonia. Then the high PH of the tanks caused the ammonia to become really toxic thus killing more fish. The whole thing snowballs and you have a wipe out.
You only need a low level of ammonia in a Tanganyikan tank to create a highly toxic environment. And depending on how big a water change your dad did might or might not have made any difference. If I get an ammonia reading on my tanks then I do a massive (80-90%) water change to dilute it. If the tanks only got a 20-30% water change it wouldn't have done much to alleviate the problem.

kj23502 · May 30, 2008

OMG that really sucks. Really any fish keepers worst nightmare :sad:

When I went out of town for a few days I just fed them a little extra a few days before and let them go hungary for 2 days. But that would be hard to do if you're gone for 2 weeks.

Soo sooo sorry for your loss MojoDex

MojoDex · May 31, 2008

yea its not good still gutted even now.

my dad did a 75% water change because thats what i told him to do. obviously me being in singapore i couldnt see the tank and my dad although he keeps fish really isnt all that good with them!

to turn a bad into a positive though ive got 2 6ft tanks to play with now :lol: