Poor Mr Peacock

[ayladiver]

Hi I am new to all this so please be gentle.
Recently my beautiful male betta (mr peacock) died after all his fins wrapped up. It happend after we cleaned our tank trying to get rid of whatever was causing the growth of this evil green stuff. It has been growing on our sand for about two weeks and its dark green and filamentous. It also grows on our plants and it is starting to take its toll on a broad leaved plant. We've tried a 50% water change, put new charcoal in our filter cleaned it, got a scaper for the glass and even bought two shrimp to help our poor algae eater. Sadly one of the shrimp died yesterday.
Please help before it kills anymore fish!

ps the tank is four months old, tried to find out what it is online but can't find anything that matches it.

 

[zoekin8yg]

Its algae more than likely. It shouldnt have killed anything as far as i know. There must be something else going on in the tank. What size is your tank and what are the water stats?

 

[ayladiver]

Our tank is 60cm long 30cm wide and 30 deep I think. As for the water stats i don't know what they are because we don't have a home testing kit and we live quite far away from our nearest test centre, and the last time we had our water tested there they were a bit useless and didn't actually say what was wrong with our water they only said it the pH was wrong, they didn't bother to say if it was too high or low. Can you recommend any good and cheap home test? as we are students and a bit short on money.

ps pH seems to be fine as far as our indicator can tell.

 

[zoekin8yg]

Are you in the UK?

Just to add your tank is about 15 US or 12 UK gallons

 

[ayladiver]

i am in the UK

 

[Jaded12]

The "green stuff" definatly sounds like algae, which def wouldn't have killed your fishies, hmmm... could you describe abit better how your poor boy looked when he passed away? Any weird markings? fuzz? was is swimming funny? Anything that may help us figure out what happened would be great

 

[Jaded12]

Gah! Double post! Sorry

 

[Ravenwing]

<--Agrees with what has been said... What kind of filter do you have?? When you added the new water I'm assuming you used a water conditioner. Do you know what temperature the water is?

What kind of algea eater do you have?? Is it an oto? Or a pleco? Or??

If it's a common pleco - those are _way_ to big for a 15 gallon tank....