[AquaticLife]Finished Cycling????
From what I’ve read so far, nothing is jumping out at me as to the cause of your fish deaths or your cycling issues. Please go through and answer each question as best you can as it’s often the little things that provide missing pieces to a puzzle when trying to diagnose fish health issues.
If these fish deaths weren’t in the first couple of days, then shock (pH, osmotic, temperature, etc.) shouldn’t be the cause and it seems you had the fish more than a few days so it is probably something other than shock.
I’ve seen the Whisper Bio-bags that also had zeolite in them. They had three compartments in the bio-bags… two had carbon and one had zeolite. If you accidentally bought the zeolite ones, that could cause your cycling issues as zeolite will start sucking up available ammonia, starving your nitrifying bacteria until they no longer produce nitrite or nitrate. While this sounds good, it’s not since it means your tank never cycles properly and you then have to constantly be buying or recharging the zeolite. It’s basically another way the filter companies try to separate us from our money… just like with carbon.
Carbon is not needed, except for in situations that require it.. like removing medications/contaminations… or in cases where people are stuck with an overstocked tank, the carbon will at least help remove some of the DOC’s until that person buys a proper sized tank or reduces the fish load. It’s not going to solve overstocking issues.. just help a little until the primary issue is resolved.
If the bloodworms are the freeze dried types, you should pre-soak them in a spoonful of tank water for a few minutes to rehydrate them. There have been issues with fish eating the dried bloodworms and then the pieces swell up inside the fish and cause digestive blockage.
I hope you’ve read enough to know NOT to throw away your filter cartridges.. as they contain the majority of your nitrifying bacteria living on all of the surface areas of the filter media… this includes the floss poly pads, sponges, carbon, etc. Since you do not have to change out the carbon, just leave it in for now until we’ve got your nitrogen cycle issues under control, then we can work on removing the carbon… which could put the tank into a mini-cycle. Read my blog article on “Filter Maintenance And Cleaning” for more details.
Is this the Bio-Bag that you are using? http://www.petsmart.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2753024
Which tap water dechlor product are you using? With your high pH water, you should probably be using Prime as a tap water dechlor since it will help with any ammonia issues. Have you ever done the tap water baseline to see if you have chloramine in your tap water? This will normally show up as 0.5ppm of ammonia during the baseline test. While this level isn’t normally something to be alarmed at, with a high pH such as yours, 0.5ppm of ammonia is very toxic to fish. In a fully cycled tank, when doing a 25% PWC, it only adds 0.125ppm which would be almost immediately converted to a very small amount of nitrate but in a newly set up tank, with a pH as high as yours, even this 0.125ppm level can be stressful to fish.
Yes, stress from being chased will eventually cause a fishes immune system to falter and the fish would be more susceptible to disease/pathogens but will not usually cause an instantaneous death like you are seeing… that is normally related to contamination or shock issues. See my blog’s “Disease - Stress Related” page for more info on how stress/shock affects our fishes health.
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
