Fish Holocaust. Help!

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J

Juzah

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Dec 8, 2008
87
0
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London, UK
Hey Everyone,

I came home this evening after spending the evening at my girlfriends house and found that all of the inhabitants of my fish tank to be dieing or dead.

I have tried to find symptoms on the fish but cant find none. Though over the last week an anubis which had been in my tank for a year mysteriously began to die, i mean..more or less all the leaves went blackish around edges and fell away. I initially put this down to the angel fish being aggressive and ripping off leaves and the leaves deteriating around the eges before i found em. The same began happening to an anubis variant (which i cant remember the name of) a few days ago, leaves and stem were rotting and coming away.

48hrs ago or so i noticed the larger angel fish to be sitting at the bottom of the tank hardly moving, swimming in place, moving slowly with the ocasional jerky movement. Though all the other fish seemed fine so i put this down to him still being half asleep as the light had been off all day.

Came home today, the mentioned angel is dead, the 2 corals deads, and the remaining angel on the brink of death. Placed him in the net and had my girlfriend hold him infront of the filter to try keep him in the air current whilst i sorted out a hospital tank for the survivors. So the 3 surviving fish (2 BN plecos and 1 angelfish) were placed in my 30g tank with un-cycled, but treated water...had no choice.... I haven't moved anything else into the tank, including filters as i dont know if it will do them harm. So for now the tank is about 40% filled, no filter, no substrate, nothing.

Logic behind this was i dont want to contaminate the hospital tank unnesecarily. Where the angel fish is stuck on its side (only 1 side of its body seems to be responding properly, 1 fin swims, the other is limp) at the bottom of the tank i didnt want to put in a filter and cause it to have to struggle against a current.

Since placing the 3 in the tank, the two plecos seem to have livened up some, swimming around occasionally. where as before they were so lifeless they didnt even move for cover when i removed their cave, they just allowd me to scoop them into the net.

My tank size is: 10G.
Its stocked with ;
2x Angel fish measuring 3'' in diametre with fins.
2x Red Coral Platy
2x Bristlenose pleco both about 3'' in size without finnage.

The substrate is medium sized gravel, with half the back of the tank covered in javamoss, a piece of driftwood in one corner and a rock cave in the other corner. The tank has been established for about..14months. Only lost 1 fish in that time, a female betta, and that was about 3-4 months ago.

I do weekly waterchanges of about 75% via gravel siphon.
Tank is not exposed to natural sunlight, room has wooden blinds constantly shut for tank sake.
Tank temp is 28celcius/82f
I feed my fish a mixture of frozen live foods and Tetramin flakes and cucumber and other vege for pleco.

Fish did eat yesterday, None were off colour, no wounds, no bloating, no spots, no veins, no fin decay, nothing at all out of the ordinary with them.

I dont have any water test kits, im sorry.
Please if possible provide help on the info posted..I will try and get test kits soon as i have the money :s
 
Hmm, I would suggest with your hospital tank putting in some air stones and try to get the water as oxygenated as possible... But I real have no idea what could have happened :[ Goodluck, hopefully someone can be of better help.
 
^ exactally what I was going to write

~ocean
 
I cant test water quality :s I have no tests...I ran out a good while ago now, i lost my job so only had the money to keep the fish fed and in clean water..
The water didnt have a funny smell to it, though it DID have a film starting.

The 3 fish seem to be a lot better now that they're in another tank, the angel fish is making attempts to get itself upright again and has managed once or twice though keeps falling back over - improvement though. And the plecos are back to swimming around doing their thing. Just hope the angel makes a big enough improvement to be fed before i sleep. I will put in a cucumber slice later for plecos.

I will dig out an airpump for the corner of tank soon as i finish typing here.
 
You can try to bring a water sample to your LFS and ask if they can test it out for you and give you the #'s
 
probably check your water with tests, or even bring a sample to your lfs store to have them test. what are the conditions of your remaining fish? any signs of parasite or external conditions? breathing hard, or rotting, or what not?
 
I would take a sample up to your LFS and ask them to test it, and make them tell you the numbers. Heck, compare the test tubes to the card yourself. Just make sure that you know the actual numbers. I think these are going to reveal a lot.

In small volumes (ten gallon tanks hold about eight and a half gallons of water after you leave some space at the top and add rocks and decor) bad things happen really quickly. It sounds like you had about eleven inches of fish in the tank, and, as I'm sure you've observed, plecos are big eaters that produce a lot of waste.

Now, prior to your coming home and seeing this, had you done any of the "no-no's" when it comes to preserving biological bacteria? This is stuff like overfeeding, washing media in tap water, using medications, or perhaps skipping a gravel vaccuming, leaving uneaten food in the substrate? Any of these would have stressed the biological filter, and caused an ammonia spike.

I hope some of this is helpful, and again, I'd go ahead and get the water tested. You want to do so soon if you're going to get results similar to what the fish were dealing with when the catastrophe occurred. If you wait too long, you won't get a good picture of what was going on.
 
Doing 75% waterchanges can be a big problem too, are you using declorinator?
 
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