[AquaticLife]Finished Cycling????
Remind us how long you have been cycling with fish? You mention four guppies and a cory… is that what you have left now? Did you allow the ammonia/nitrites to get too high at some point that caused the fish deaths or do you know if there was some other issue that caused them?
If you have live plants and have been doing a lot of PWC’s and your tap water has zero nitrates, then you could possibly have zero or low enough nitrates in the tank… but it’s not likely.
Normally, even the best maintained FW tanks will have 5-10ppm of nitrates in the water and plants need them as a food source.
It’s good that your ammonia and nitrite are zero but since your nitrates are also zero, it could mean there’s a problem. Double check that you are using the test kit accurately. Make sure the test kit is not expired. If you are OK with that, then lets move on to another possibility that came up with another member recently.
What kind of filter system do you have and what kind of filter media do you have in the filter system? Do you have any kind of white rocks/chips in the filter system or cartridge. Give us links to your filter system and the types of cartridges or filter media that you use.
I would not add more fish right now until we figure out what’s going on with your nitrogen cycle.
As far as the decorations, not knowing where they came from would make me very leery about using them. If you knew they came from a SW tank, then you could sterilize them and probably use them without a problem. Salt is not the problem since the little amount of salt they might leach, if they were in an SW tank, would be negligible. The bigger issue would be bacteria, pathogens, chemicals, etc… or if these rocks were used in a garden, then pesticides, etc., could be a problem. While boiling may kill off any bacteria/pathogens, it may not leach out all of the other possible nasties like chemicals that could have soaked into some of the porous stones. Of course, I could just be overly cautious and they’ll all be perfectly fine.
If your fish start showing any signs of distress, be prepared to do a series of 25% PWC’s, five or six of them, one every hour, and run fresh carbon in your filter.
Lenny Vasbinder Fish Blog - http://GoldLenny.blogspot.com (Links to any articles referenced in above reply are listed on the right side, alphabetically under Labels and also under Archives by Year, Month)
Category: Philippines Internet Koi Society
