Do smelts or shrimps cause excessive clowdyness

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Whynot91

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Nov 29, 2009
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Toronto
I have noticed that my tank is getting cloudier day by day since i started feeding smelts/shrimps to my stingrays. When i was feeding pellets i didn't have this problem. The quality of the water is OK however it seems to be getting very cloudy.

I was feeding them 1 smelt but now i give them about 1.5 or 2 smelts. Do you think its because the filtration is getting used to the bio load. I'm running 2 fx5's and a eheim 2217.

Please advise.
 
Smelts are high in oil content and shrimp are high in fats. Actually, any large fresh food left uneaten (either whole or in pieces) will contribute to bacterial blooms.

Remove uneaten foods one it's ignored by your fish and keep up on routine maintenance.
 
The motoro's keep eating. There is usually never any uneaten food. I just noticed the cloudyness after i started feelding smelts.
 
Shrimps are the main cause. Whenever I feed mine hikari FD krill, my tank starts to smell and my water turns cloudy. I suggest removing any uneaten food from the tank and increase your substrate cleaning schedule (if any).
 
I agree the smell is unbareable.

Like i mentioned before there is usually never any uneaten food. If its not eaten by morning then its gone by evening. If my motoro's don't get to it then my bass more than likely finish it off.
 
anything thats not eaten right away should be taken out after a period of 10mins or so. even though smelt and shrimp are equatic animals once they are dead and the water has access to the interior of their body, body functions that usually are responsible for keeping the body in balance so that its not to saturated cease to work. the body becomes water logged and falls apart very easily. try soaking one of ur smelt in the tank for an hour then pciking it up, it falls apart. so even if the food particles that are left over are gone by evening it doesnt necessarily mean that there being eaten but it is more likely that there breaking down and that is whats clouding your water.
 
i get the cloudiness within a few minutes of adding market shrimp to the tank too. once they're done eating/you net it out, the cloudiness dissipates from filtration.
 
Now i'm even more confused.

I'm personally starting to think my bio is not established in my fx5's. I have only filled the trays, half way to the top of each tray with bio media.

I would have to agree, the food might really not be getting eaten but just splashed around and being sucked up in the filter. The ray's are pretty active
 
Thanks for the all the info:

It looks like i was over feeding the fish. I was cleaning out the fx5's and when i connected them back and turned them on there was soooo much guck that came out of the pipes. I guess it was it was just sitting there in the pipes. It was like smelt/shrimp remains or something and it was like pure white. All my fish went into shock luckily they are all ok

The water is started to clear up a little bit.

Lesson learned, if your ray's dont eat the food up right away then you are overfeeding and the food will just get stuck in the filter pipes. I was under the impression the rays were taking thier time eating it but it was really just getting sucked into the filter.
 
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