My First Sub-Tropical Tank...

[BlueDragon]

Hi : )
I've just introduced myself here and I thought I'd try to explain myself. So Here's my story about my first experiences with a sub-tropical tank...

So I kept Goldfish as a kid. I tryed my best with them. I kept normals, Shubunkins, fantails, Black Moors and a Weather Loach named Dog. I just couldn't keep the Fantails alive no matter what I did. And the two Black Moors I tryed to keep both died the same day I brought them home. After a while I gave up after even my favourite Shubunkin got ill. I was very upset that I'd managed to kill so many Fish after I thought I'd tryed so hard to keep them right. And for years I couldn't think of keeping Fish again.
I now realize that it was probably a combo of crappy local water and a tank that was probably too small.

Fast forward to when I move my GALS into another tank and I am then left with an empty tank. Despite everything I still wish I could have Fish, I often watch them swimming around in the petshop I go to and wonder where I went wrong. So I deside to try and find out. I deside to learn more about Fishkeeping and with one thing tending to lead to another with these things I was soon looking up particular Fish species, their care etc. I print out loads of info on general care, tank care, plant care, water care and species care. I read it all over again and again. It gets quite exciting, you know?
So I deside to clean and perpare the empty tank.
I take it outside and scrub it down, getting all the dirt and algae and slime off it from the Snails living in there. I soak it in a Milton souloution all day and then scrub it again with some more. I get it all sparkly again and then deside to re-seal it, just in case. I bring it inside, fill it up, leave it a week and then empty it, move it to where it'll live and fill it up again, but this time with gravel, and plants and a bit of tree! That took a week but I kinda enjoyed it 'cause it was a sunny week that week... I got very wet though and must have stank of Milton!
I leave it for a week to Fishless cycle. Stupedly I know now that a week isn't long enough and so no doubt that was my first big mistake.
I go and bring home four 'Male' Guppies and a single Platy who was all by her self in the tank next to the Guppy's. All was well... till I saw that one Guppy was infact female. Well, not the end of the world. So I read up on pregnancies, birth and after care.
A week later I bring home three more female Guppies so that Gem wouldn't get harrased by the boys. I also bring home two more Platies. One male and one female. Again all seems fine untill three days later. The male Platy is poorly. He's hiding, sitting his belly on the gravel. I take him out of the main tank and wonder what's wrong with him. The next day I can see the dreaded 'cotton wool' on his tail. A tiny bit up his back. No sign of rot so maybe it's not that bad? I get the only treatment I could find in a hurry, Methyline Blue, and treat him with that. But he only gets worse. After finding out that it's Columnaris I'm dealing with and not just some 'everyday' fungal infection I then deside to dose the whole tank. Better safe than sorry, right?
Two days afterwards and poor little Mouse, the Platy, is no better. He's breathing irregular, practically on his side and the 'cotton wool' has spread to further up his back. His tail is a mess. Then he starts tencing up and I can see he's in pain. I couldn't sit and watch him like that so in the end I descided to put him to sleep. I'm not sure if I can say how I did it on here, but I knocked him out with a certain oil before using a certain large eletrical aplience.
My poor little Mouse.
A few days later and everything seems fine. Fish are all happy, eating, pooping, flirting... Happy days.
A week later and Sunny is poorly. He's sitting on the gravel and just looks so knackered. But this time I'm determined not to loose. I managed to get hold of Myxazin and dose the whole tank straight away. Sunny in a breeder net hung in the tank so I can keep an eye on him, everyone else in the main tank. I try to keep him eating. He loves bloodworms so I gave him an extra share to try to keep him going. But it's not looking good. He's not moving, his breathing is fast, fins are back and down, he's practically on his side... he's a sad boy. But he doesn't give up, and the day after the first treatment I catch him trying to swim! He hasn't got much energy, bless him, but he's trying!
Every day he trys harder to swim. He seems to make it a challenge to try to swim higher and higher.
And then I come down stairs to find Bluey. He's gone. No warning, no signs. It was a shock.
But a week later and there have been no more deaths and no signs of illness. And best of all my Sunny boy is doing much better : ) Swimming around, breathing normal, eating again, pooping fine... So I do a very risky thing. I put him back in the main tank. He starts swimming around, greating the other fish... flirting with the girls ; )
I continue to treat the whole tank for the time it says to on the bottle before stopping.

Since then there have been no more signs of illness, no more deaths, no more 'cotton wool' anywhere... I've never seen my Fish so happy : )

The End.


I'm glad this story had a happy ending, but it's left me worrying about a lot of things and wondering about a lot of things too.

Mouse must have been ill before I brought him home, but he seemed fine when I was watching him in the petshop. Was there something I could have done to prevent him from becoming so poorly? I realize that the MB was next to useless but it was all I could get hold of there and then. I'm asking myself did I make Mouse ill?
Sunny never showed any signs of columnaris other than he was behaving the same as Mouse. He never displayed any 'cotton wool' anywhere. But the Myxazin obviously did something and did it fast. So even without the outward signs could he still have caught Columnaris or was it something else that I was just seeing as Columnaris because at the time I was obsessing over it?
Non of the other fish ever got poorly or showed any signs of having something wrong (other than they didn't much like it when I first put the Myxazin in the water, but they got used to it). Even Bluey seemed totally fine. But is there a chance that they all now have it in them somwhere? As a dormant state. Is there a chance that it could come back and they'd all get ill? Is there something I can do to try and stop it?
I was putting salt in the water, just a tiny bit, to also try and treat it. But all the fish got very upset with it so I took it back out.

I'm curently doing a water change every day while the new filter cartridge has chance to mature and the bacteria lost during treatment has time to recolonize the tank. I'm treating the water with Safe Guard as I put it in the tank, I'm putting Safe Water in the tank every day after the water change and feeding the plants every two weeks with aquarium plant feed. I have natural gravel with a peice of bog wood and all the plants are live. That's it really.
I use a fifty to twohundred litre filter turned up half way between the two. That fills the whole tank with tiny, tiny little bubbles and creates water movment. But there are places in the tank where the Fish can rest without having to fight a current. I have a aquaglow light on eight hours a day on a timer.

Now that I've had to deal with all that in just a short time after trying again with Fish I'd like to start getting it right now : /

 

[MegaZerino]

unless they are swimming funny or have the cotton wool when you buy them, i think its pretty hard to tell. Something you could do is when you buy new fish, put them in a spare tank for a week to see if any illnesses prgress, if not, then they should be fine to put in the main tank. Im glad to hear that he survived, every time a fish of mine has got sick, it's always died, i dont seem to be very good at curing them

 

[Judgejudy]

The ' cotton wool ' could have been a common infeccion alled ick or white spot. You can buy he treatment at your local fish store.

 

[fluttermoth]

Ich/witespot doesn't look like cotton wool; it looks like the fish has been sprinkled with salt.

It was more than likely common fungus; columnaris is very persistent and difficult to treat; it also tends to attack the fish's mouth area (hence the common name of 'mouth fungus, although it's not a fungus) rather than fins or back. Fungus is quite common in fish who've had their slime coat compromised in some way; either by rough handling while being caught, attacks by other fish or poor water quality (probably the latter in this case).

As long as you keep up the water changes, you should be fine; do you have a test kit so you can monitor the levels of ammonia and nitrite though? If you haven't I'd invest in one as soon as you can; it's an essential piece of kit for any fishkeeper, IMO.

 

[BlueDragon]

Thank you for your replies : )

It definatly wasn't Ich or White Spot. It was like white fluff. Not like salt or spots.

Mouse did have a tiny nick out of his tail when I got him but he had no sign of anything odd on him. His 'shy' behaviour lead me to beleive he was just nervy of the other Fish 'cause he'd been bullied at some point. I should have noticed it was something more than that. The last day before he died he did have the tiniest bit of 'fluff' on the top of his mouth. Could hardly see it. But the most noticable bits were his tail and his back. I would have assumed it was just infection from the nick if it hadn't been over his back too.

Maybe it wasn't Columnaris in the end, everything I looked up seemed to point to that though. But I had nothing more concreate to compare it with.

I do have a water testing kit. I didn't at first. I read that the Fish I have aren't fussy about PH etc and took that to mean that it mustn't be important to keep it a certain something. I know now that that is just stupid.
I'm keeping an eye on levels every few days at the minuet while everything is building back up. I'm not sure if it's normal or not but the levels don't seem to be changing? Is that good or bad?

Yesterday's results were as follows:

Amonia: between zero and 0.5

PH: some funny symbol things and then 6.4
KH: 50
GH: 125
Nirate (NO 3): 0
Nitrite (NO2): 0

I'm dyslexic so you'll have to ignore my stupidity with numbers.

I'll take another test on Wednesday, and then Sunday again etc.

Anything else I can be doing?

 

[fluttermoth]

You really should be testing every day, and doing enough water changes that the ammonia and nitrite never go above 0.25ppm.

That may mean you need to do a large water change every day, or even twice a day, to keep them under that level.

 

[OldMan47]

Welcome to the forum Bluedragon.
It sounds like you went through a lot as a new fish keeper and now have a healthy tank. It is up to you to keep it that way, the way you have been doing, by doing water changes as needed based on chemical testing results. Your experience with columnaris is something that I have not had to deal with in the last 30 years so the memory of it has had some time to fade for me. I can certainly sympathize with what you went through though.
Sorry to need to interfere here Judy but ich/white spot never presents itself as cotton wool. It looks more like individual salt crystals on the fish's surface.
Blue dragon, you have water that is best suited to things like tetras and cories, not the common livebearers that I keep like guppies, swordtails, platies and mollies. Testing is your friend so just do your tests and figure the ratio it would take to reduce your water levels to less than 0.25 ppm of both nitrites and ammonia. That is the best guidance you are likely to get and it is right there in your own hands.

 

[BlueDragon]

I'm really sorry but I hope I've missunderstood this somewhere along the line... and knowing me I probably have.

You want me to raise the amonia and Nitrate levels to 25??? I read they're supposed to be at zero and that's what they're at now. Won't raising them to that level poison my Fish???

I'm afraid I can't raise the levels like that. What does it acheive?

The other readings, like PH, are fine as far as all the papers say that I printed. What's wrong for my Fish?

I'm afraid that I'm not totally understanding the tests and what they mean, so I'm sorry if I seem really dim. Numbers aren't exactly my friends. I'm just going by what it says on the tubs and trying to keep it all to within what I thought was right for my Fish based on what the papers say. I have next to know idea what the numbers mean, just that everything bad should be at zero and everything else should be what it say's on the papers.

I'm still doing daily water changes and today I used a gravel syphon for the first time (that's a long story but I would have had one a long time before now if my order hadn't had been put down wrong at the petshop). I think a good mental note for that should have to be "Needs much more practice".

 

[fluttermoth]

You have misunderstood somewhere along the line, BlueDragon!

No one is advising you to raise the levels of ammonia or nitrite, they're advising you to make sure those two things stay under[/i] 0.25ppm.

Let me see if I can help you with what the numbers mean.

Fish produce ammonia, all the time. It's a byproduct of both their digestion and respiration. In the wild, the ammonia would be washed away (if the fish live in a river) or massively diluted (if the fish live in a lake). Our tanks always have a lot more fish than 'wild waters' would, so the ammonia can build up to dangerous levels, as it is toxic to the fish.

Luckily there are bacteria that will live in our filters that will eat the ammonia for us. They turn the ammonia into nitrite, which is also toxic, but there are another family of bacteria that will eat the nitrite and turn it into nitrAte, which is only poisonous to fish at very high levels; somewhere over 100ppm for most fish, but obviously we wouldn't want to let our nitrate get that high, as it could make our fish feel ill and weaken them, leaving them more likely to catch diseases.

'Cycling' is just a short word for the process of growing those good bacteria in our filters. Once you have a colony of the bacteria, your tests will always show 'zero' for both ammonia and nitrite, because it's being eaten as soon as the fish produce it. The nitrate will be higher, as that's what all the ammonia and nitrite are being turned into, and we keep the nitrate levels as low as we can with water changes, and maybe by growing plants that use the nitrate as a fertilizer. Most tap water has some nitrate in it as well, so it's very unusual to have zero nitrate in a tank.

Hope that helps

 

[BlueDragon]

OK, sorry. I'll try again.

So what does 0.25 mean then? It doesn't mean I should be leaving the ammonia and Nitrate to rise to 25?

And what is PPM? I don't have that on my test kit.

I think I understand the cycles that a tank goes through (I'm still learning it right), with occational Nitrate (or Nitrite?) spikes that somehow need to be avoided but I don't know how?

Right now I have a reading of zero for ammonia, Nitrate and for Nitrite. But I don't have a healthy bacteria colony right now due to the treatment I used for my Fish that killed it off. So I'm in the prosess of re-building it. I have a liquid that I'm putting in the water every day after the water change that has four different bacteria in it as well as Bacillus (sp?) Bacteria. So I'm hoping that this will help re-colonize the tank. Could this be the reason why my Nitrate reading is at zero right now? Does it matter for now or should I be worried?

I do have plants in the tank that I feed with liquid fertilizer and they in turn help feed the Fish. I have a few in there 'cause the Fish don't seem to like too few. Could the plants be efecting the readings?

I also have a peice of bog wood in the tank that I didn't think anything of, but have now learned that it might make the test readings inacurate? Is that a possability? The Fish like the wood there and so do I so I wouldn't really want to get rid of it, is there another way I can make sure the readings are right? Or is it a bad idea to have wood in the tank?

I think I'm getting it now though. Ammonia and Nitrite: bad. Keep at zero. Nitrate also bad, but nothing to worry about as long as it's a low number too? Bacteria get munchies for ammonia and Nitrite: good! Bacteria stay greedy: healthy tank cycle. It that right?

I'll write that down in my file, keep it handy.

Thank you for being patient with me : )

 

[fluttermoth]

So what does 0.25 mean then? It doesn't mean I should be leaving the ammonia and Nitrate to rise to 25?

And what is PPM? I don't have that on my test kit.

PPM is 'parts per million'. It's a way of measuring how much of a certain chemical there is in a certain volume of water. If your ammonia was 1, for instance, that would mean you had one part ammonia to one million parts of water. It doesn't matter if the 'parts' are milligrams, litres or gallons, the percentage of ammonia to water would all be the same, and would give you the same reading. 0.25ppm, means you have one quarter of a 'part' to one million 'parts' of water. That shows you how toxic ammonia is, if it can affect fish in such tiny amounts. Most test kits are in PPM, even if it doesn't say that clearly.

It's similar to how alcohol content is measured; a glass of brandy and a barrel of brandy would both be, say, 35% alcohol; the brandy in the barrel isn't stronger than the brandy in the glass; the alcohol is still 35% of the total volume, even though the volume is larger.

I think I understand the cycles that a tank goes through (I'm still learning it right), with occational Nitrate (or Nitrite?) spikes that somehow need to be avoided but I don't know how?

Spikes happen when a toxin, like nitrite, is being produced without there being any of the bacteria to eat it. If you had a totally bare tank, with no fish, you'd have zero ammonia, zero nitrite and whatever nitrate was in the tap water. If you then added fish (this is what happens in a fish-in cycle), the ammonia would spike (ie, rise to a high level very quickly), as it would be being excreted by the fish, and there would be no bacteria to eat it. Once the first lot of bacteria (the ones that eat ammonia and turn it into nitrite) were growing, the ammonia would drop (because the bacteria were eating it) and the nitrite would spike (because the first lot of bacteria were producing nitrite from the ammonia, but there wouldn't be any of the nitrite eating bacteria yet).

In a fish in cycle, we have to get rid of the ammonia and nitrite by doing water changes. You can't avoid the ammonia and nitrite levels rising, because that's part of the cycling process, but you can prevent it reaching dangerous levels by doing lots and lots of big water changes. In a fishless cycle, you can just let the spikes happen and wait for the bacteria to grow and eat it, as there are no fish that can be hurt by the raised levels; the bacteria don't mind.

The nitrate doesn't spike, it gradually rises as the ammonia and nitrate are eaten.

Right now I have a reading of zero for ammonia, Nitrate and for Nitrite. But I don't have a healthy bacteria colony right now due to the treatment I used for my Fish that killed it off. So I'm in the prosess of re-building it. I have a liquid that I'm putting in the water every day after the water change that has four different bacteria in it as well as Bacillus (sp?) Bacteria. So I'm hoping that this will help re-colonize the tank. Could this be the reason why my Nitrate reading is at zero right now? Does it matter for now or should I be worried?

The fact that you have no nitrate (although nitrate tests are the most unreliable) would indicate an uncycled tank. If you had any of the nitrite eating bacteria, you would see the nitrate level rising, as that's what those bacteria would be producing from the nitrite. Really, in most cases, the nitrate level is unimportant. Only in old tanks, or ones that are overstocked, and that aren't getting enough water changes does the nitrate have a chance to rise to dangerous levels.

I do have plants in the tank that I feed with liquid fertilizer and they in turn help feed the Fish. I have a few in there 'cause the Fish don't seem to like too few. Could the plants be efecting the readings?

It could be that the plants are using some of the ammonia, or nitrate as food, but you would have to have a lot of plants and not many fish for it to be making a difference. Fish are always happier and more confident if they have lots of hiding places close at hand (or fin, I guess!). You and I know there are no predators in our tanks, but the fish don't!

I also have a peice of bog wood in the tank that I didn't think anything of, but have now learned that it might make the test readings inacurate? Is that a possability? The Fish like the wood there and so do I so I wouldn't really want to get rid of it, is there another way I can make sure the readings are right? Or is it a bad idea to have wood in the tank?

Bogwood can lower pH slightly, but it's nothing to worry about. I have loads and loads of bogwood in most of my tanks, and it's not a problem. It can turn the water a brownish colour, but unless you filled your tank completely with it, it wouldn't colour the water enough to affect your test results.

I think I'm getting it now though. Ammonia and Nitrite: bad. Keep at zero. Nitrate also bad, but nothing to worry about as long as it's a low number too? Bacteria get munchies for ammonia and Nitrite: good! Bacteria stay greedy: healthy tank cycle. It that right?

Yes, that's very well said!
You really only need to worry about nitrate if it gets up near the 60-80 ppm level.

I'll write that down in my file, keep it handy.

Thank you for being patient with me : )

You're very welcome, I know how confusing it can all be at the start! I'm sure your misundertandings are down to my poor explanations!

 

[BlueDragon]

Thank you for that : ) In fact I'll print all that out instead ; )

I did (or thought I'd done) a fishless cycle. But I know now that I hadn't left it long enough. So does that mean that my tank is still not cycled? Or has it all been effected by the medcine? Am I back to square one again?

You can only see a slight brown colour from the tannin from the wood when you take some water out of the tank. You can't see it in the tank, the water looks clear. So that's OK?

How can I tell when I have a healthy bacteria colony in my tank again if ammonia, Nitrite and Nitrate readings are all at zero? Will they sudenly change/spike?

 

[fluttermoth]

It's hard, at this point, to tell if your tank was never cycled or if the bacteria were affected by the medication. As you have no nitrate being produced, you probably are back to square one, I'm afraid!

Yes, the brownish colour from the bogwood is just tannin (same as you get in tea) and it's fine.

You want to be testing your water every day. To begin with, you'll probably start seeing traces of ammonia (hopefully not too much!), and you'll do a water change to get it to as near zero as you can. Then you might (not everyone does) get traces of nitrite showing up, and again you reduce that with water changes.

Eventually, you'll be able to test the water for a few days and get zero readings for both ammonia and nitrite without having to change any of the water at all. Then you'll know your filter is cycled.

 

[HM Dragon Devil]

Hi. I was going to give my 2 cents seeing i'm currently cycling, but there's really nothing to add.

Great advice, fluttermoth.

Dean.

 

[BigbruiserAl]

hey blue welcome to forum, where about in durham are there a few of that can help around town if you get really stuck