Tradegy

NottsFishy · Mar 2, 2008

I woke up this morning to find nearly all my fish in my 45gall tank dead . :-(

I did a ph, nitrite, nitrate and ammonia test to find out was wrong and it seems a ph drop happened my normal ph is around 7 - 7.5 but i checked it and it was nearly 4ph does anyone know what happened i put in a prawn for my loach to eat could this have caused it ???.

I lost all my clown loach all my scissortail rasborah and nearly all my black skirt tetras i have one surviving tetra my four snakeskin gourami and my common plec are fine though they dont seem to have been affected .

WILDER · Mar 2, 2008

R.I.P.
The prawn could of caused an ammonia spike but not to drop the ph that fast.
Do you have plenty of aeration in the tank.
Added anything new to the tank.

Did the fish eat the prawn or was it still uneaten.

Larissa · Mar 2, 2008

So sorry to hear about your losses. How hard/soft is your water and how long had it been since you did a water change? Maybe a lack of buffering capacity caused the pH crash if your plants used up the total dissolved solids. Also, do you dose with Co2?

NottsFishy · Mar 2, 2008

I have a air pump going constantly.
My last water change was on friday as i finished work early and decided to do it i then.
Nothing new has been added to the tank recently last thing to be added was a peice of driftwood but that was early january.
I dont use co2 going to soon but on my little tank.

Colin_T · Mar 2, 2008

it's unusual for the PH to drop that much that quickly. Have you retested the tank. If I ever get a weird test result I rinse the phials out and do the test again just to confirm the results.
The only real way to drop the PH that quickly would be using a buffer, (something like PH down), or if the tank was completely full of plants and there was no aeration or light. Because there is an airpump running continuously that wouldn't happen. This leaves us with a faulty test or someone putting something in the tank.
The only other option would be the tap water has a low PH. The water change you did dropped the tank's PH. Maybe check your tap water.