Lost All My Fish

[fishy24]

At the weekend, we noticed that our bristlenose plecs had a load of babies, we noticed them mostly at night when they would come out onto the glass and they were tiny, so only just hatched. Then it all started to go wrong on Monday. We have lost all of our fish in 2 days (7 cardinal tetra's first, then our 4 platys and 4 guppies and then our 4 bristlenoses and 6 glowlight tetra's). Obviously the baby bristlenose's didn't stand a chance.

Our tank is 150L, and I have kept up with my weekly 30% water change and tested the water regulary, 0 amonia, 0 nitrite and 40 nitrate (this is what it is out of the tap also) and have been using Seacham Prime to dechlorinate the water before adding it to the tank.

I think the cause of this is Ick. The last thing I added to the tank were the 4 platys from our local fish shop. This was around 2 weeks ago. Could the fish that were added have been infected?

I am so gutted. We took things nice a slow, cycled the tank for months to get it right and then added the fish slowly over several months, we did everything that I could think of to do it right. And now we have lost all of our fish.

What do i need to do now to make the tank safe for fish to be introduced again?

 

[star4]

Do a large waterchange, upto 75% and feed your filter, a bit of ammonia or some fish food will help. Do a thorough gravel vac also. Do you know it was definately ich? if so raise the temperture to 30C still feeding your filter and do a daily gravel vac of about 10%, check your water stats after a week then slowly add more fish. When you do add more fish (oh and turn the temperature down again) it might be worth adding a dose of ich treatment the day you add the fish as the treatment only works on the spores not the spots on the fish, this way when the spores hatch to search out the fish the treatment will kill them before they get to the fish.
Hope this helps