Sorry for the long post - I need to rant for a bit...
My 100g has been running stably for years. It has 2 canister filters and a large DIY W/D filter and gets 30-50% weekly water changes. Everything has been fine until about a week ago. I went to feed the fish in the morning and noticed a number of them were gasping and others had cloudy eyes. The edges of their fins looked white. It looked a lot like ammonia burn. An ammonia test revealed 0.5-1mg/mL ammonia in the water. I immediately did a few large water changes and added a bunch of Amquel. Fish looked a little better.
I have no idea what happened. I guessed something must have caused the bacteria in my filters to crash. I moved all the filter media from my other aquariums into my sump. I stopped feeding the fish and kept up daily water changes for two days but then I had to go out of town for a week for a conference.
The day after I left my wife told me that several of my fish had died - 3 of my 5" clown loaches, my lima shovelnose and my prized Hemisorubim platyrhyncos
She kept doing daily water changes but finally did an ammonia test on the tap water and found that it was 1mg/mL out of the friggin tap! I don't know if my testkit is off, but that seems pretty weird. Since then, she stopped the daily water changes but just kept adding Amquel every day.
I just got home today. The remaining fish are still alive and seem to be behaving normally but don't look great. A number have cloudy eyes, and on one of my geos it looks like the membrane on one of its eyes is protruding out (this doesn't look like popeye - it's just the external membrane). Any idea what this could be? How do I fix it?
Another of the geos has pretty bad HITH - but it's only one of them. Any explanation for why only one of the fish would be affected? I know that HITH is normally attributable to poor water quality, but I've been religious about my water changes. Unfortuately it seems like the tap water itself may be the problem. I'm not sure what to do...
My 100g has been running stably for years. It has 2 canister filters and a large DIY W/D filter and gets 30-50% weekly water changes. Everything has been fine until about a week ago. I went to feed the fish in the morning and noticed a number of them were gasping and others had cloudy eyes. The edges of their fins looked white. It looked a lot like ammonia burn. An ammonia test revealed 0.5-1mg/mL ammonia in the water. I immediately did a few large water changes and added a bunch of Amquel. Fish looked a little better.
I have no idea what happened. I guessed something must have caused the bacteria in my filters to crash. I moved all the filter media from my other aquariums into my sump. I stopped feeding the fish and kept up daily water changes for two days but then I had to go out of town for a week for a conference.
The day after I left my wife told me that several of my fish had died - 3 of my 5" clown loaches, my lima shovelnose and my prized Hemisorubim platyrhyncos
She kept doing daily water changes but finally did an ammonia test on the tap water and found that it was 1mg/mL out of the friggin tap! I don't know if my testkit is off, but that seems pretty weird. Since then, she stopped the daily water changes but just kept adding Amquel every day.
I just got home today. The remaining fish are still alive and seem to be behaving normally but don't look great. A number have cloudy eyes, and on one of my geos it looks like the membrane on one of its eyes is protruding out (this doesn't look like popeye - it's just the external membrane). Any idea what this could be? How do I fix it?
Another of the geos has pretty bad HITH - but it's only one of them. Any explanation for why only one of the fish would be affected? I know that HITH is normally attributable to poor water quality, but I've been religious about my water changes. Unfortuately it seems like the tap water itself may be the problem. I'm not sure what to do...
