channel cats dying ;_;

[wynnyelle]

Hi I bought 10 baby channel cats for my big pond in the spring, they were about 1.5-2 inches long and 1 arrived dead so I had 9. they arrived on Nov. 1. I'm wintering them over in a 55 gallon tub till they are a little bigger and the pond warms up in the spring (its already cold here where I live and they would die if I put them in it now) I feed them earthworms (chopped) frozen shrimp, bloodworms, frozen mysis shrimp. They hide most of the time but eat pretty well.

I have them on a constant drip. Ammonia is 0, nitrites are 0, nitrates 10 ppm or even less. PH is 7.5. Temperature around 70 degrees (room temp).

The Problem: they are dying one by one ;_; they don't show any obvious signs of being sick, like they don't look unusual at all they just turn up dead. I am now down to 6...plz help me help my poor little babies...

 

[piranhaman00]

Acclimate them to the pond and put them in there. They will be fine.

 

[wynnyelle]

Ok! Thanks for the response. We are having a major frost tomorrow night (20 degrees) so should I wait till this weekend? Meanwhile, what do you think is killing them?

 

[piranhaman00]

It must be something with your water but I cannot be certain. Being on a drip system really negates this issue of course, maybe the dead fish being in with them created an illness they caught. Could be a number of factors.

 

[wynnyelle]

Well I upped the drip after finding the 2 dead ones this morning just to flush out all that bad stuff. Tested the water again though and it had no ammonia or anything, those are the readings above.

 

[wynnyelle]

Oh and I forgot to add, the 1st fish died before there were any dead ones in there at all. It started to just weaken and lose control over its swimming over 24 hours or so, and I think november 2nd or 3rd was the day it just up and died. I did not witness the 2nd one dying, but noticed another one slowly losing control of swimming and drifting around the tank although it was still active, just it was starting to act like the 1st one that died, but was still alive, a few days ago. Then nothing turned up so all seemed ok. That was on the 4th. I found one dead one this morning kind of mouldy looking so it must have been dead for at least a couple days, the other one was freshly dead. I would've gotten them out sooner but they probably died whilst hiding so until this morning their bodies were not found. The water was slightly cloudy last night (I'd been away for a day) so I did a water change then and used prime. The water was then good from then on. Not sure how bad it was before because as soon as I saw it a little cloudy I did a large change (in addition to the drip).

(I'm editing this to put in as much detail as I can.)

Now the fish seem ok and I have had 6 small guppies in there too as dither fish (the cats are too small to eat them so they are safe) and they have been fine from the getgo so whatever is going on is affecting only the cats.

But I have lost 3 out of 9 in only a few days and I'm really scared of losing the others I'm going to keep the drip turned up to what it is now for a while and see what that does. But if you great people here at MFK have any other ideas of what could have killed my kitties please let me know, I don't want to lose the little cuties.