Help! There's something wrong with my Jar...?

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ausarow;

Thank you very much! That was super informative. And I agree... adding chemicals has never really worked for me in the past for treating any of my fish.... I guess it's safe to lay off the melafix and pimfix for now, he's still swimming around his tank.

I have flipped over every tank ornaments I didn't find anything dead in terms of fish...however to my surprise...all the snails are dead? or I simply can't find any snails crawling up the tank wall where as I always see them at least 1... is that a good thing or a bad thing? I don't have a pleco to clean my algae as I never really had an algae prob. Now I do tho... without all those snails around...

what is your opinion on Cycle and using water conditioner? The aquaPlus that I use claims that it gets rid of chlorine. I would set my water out in the sun but right now it's winter out there...So i can only use water conditioner. I will go find out more about water agers, I have never heard of it, I've always been recommended using Cycle to age my water. What are you opinions about that?

If he doesn't give up I'm not going to give up on him.

You're right, I know I should have taken more action when one of my parrot got sick. It's still healing as I'm speaking...in a much smaller hospital tank, hopefully I'll be able to fix him up... he got a beating too and a lot of scales fell off.

The water is currently slightly less cloudy, I hope that's a good sign, how long does it ususally take to nurse a tank to health from a disaster?

I'm still very concerned the swollen looking face my fish has... I certainly hope it's not dropsy or anything fatal. That's one of the stage a few of my kois with dropsy went through in the past...

Anyway... I'll lay off on the chemicals, I haven't added anything since the last water change. And I also got some new readings from the tank compared to last time

PH: 7.2 (same)
AMMONIA: 0.25 (has increased by 0.25)
NITITE: 0.25 (same)
NITRATE: 10 (same)

My Jar is not gasping like he was yesterday, I've stopped feeding completely. BUt he's still very pale and face is swollen or his eyes have sunkened... :(

okay he's swimming occasionally but constantly stays in one corder ofthe tank for awhile before swimming another round.
 
ok mate good. my thoughts on water ager? like i say it does remove chlorine. thats mainly all it does. chlorine is used by water companies to kill organisms in water so that you dont get sick and sue them. now it kills the biological filters in your tanks. the company puts z amount of sodium thiosulphate in to beat a standard does of chlorine that the cmpany puts in at the dose station. now dpending on where you are as distance form the dose station you may have high or low chlorine levels. maybe very little. in that case there may be extra sodium thio that is not been used up with the reaction with chlorine to remove the chlorine. now sometimes i have noticed periods where my drinking tap water is foul wit too much chlorine. take a 200 litre drum. stick tap water in it. and stick an aerstone in it. air will bubble of chlorine into the atmosphere even without sun on the water. sun just helps it faster i reckon.
if you have funds, stick a heater in that tank. then your water is as good as it needs to be, if your jar went fine and other fish went fine then your tap water is ok after these is done. you will not need frigg around with ager ever again. thatll pay for the heater and the tub and youll feel very confident when you change that its better.

now before you even buy a fish to stick in a new tank people should be feeding a filter with ammonia and then wait for readings to come good before putting the fish in. no one does but this is why we have problems. filter take up time differs a lot.

i want you to go find a graph on the ammonia cycle.
make sure your readings dont go higher.
algae is a sighn that you have nitrate. remember that nitrate aint so bad! its a sigh of health really. maybe your snails die when ammonia goes so high too.
remove dead snails. they contribute to the ammonia spike. see once you crash you crash further.. if you can have ammonia and nitrate on the lowest reading then great.

see one form of bacteria will develop to grow on the ammonia.
it will change ammonia to nitrite.
then another form ( species) can colonise your bio balls etc.
this species will change nitrite to nitrate. then your plants and alga can take that out. you do need to harvest algae or plants to remove it or do water changes to keep it down but its only toxic to fish in high levels.

but notice you actually need some ammonia and some nitrite to start a filter.
lets say your graph you should find might identify it takes three weeks or more for the first bio species to form. then ammonia is high if youve been putting in feed.
once it begins to change it to nitrite the other species can begin to connvert it to the not so toxic nitrate. i would say broadly it would take about 2 months to be fully established. but of course depending on feeding temps air etc.
i still think your filter took a big set back and crashed. so continue to nurse. you do not feed. glad you listened about that. not many do and it kills most fish.

if your readings go higher, ie 50 do a small water change as i said. you can use ager for now. its ok. imagine if you fed or more snails rot or algae rots.. which is possible too. that your ammonia will go higher. i wouldnt be too concerned with .25 however your fish would be better to have 0 but you probably do need some so you can get a decent size good bacteria population on your filter media. it may go to zero if it is established and then your nitrite will still be up. you have to be the judge but keep taking readings to see it happen. but someone has graphed this out for you so check it out by googling.
 
i dont want you to buy any product, i want you to steal some bioballs from your good tank and stick them in the sick tank.
 
I took a good long look at my jar just now...he hasn't iimproved!! His eyes have sunken more!!!

And I am seeing some slightly raised scales....on one side!!! :eek:


WHAT DO I DO NOW???? OMG!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
 
if your water is still cloudy run your water through a 1 micron filter bag if you have acess. he is probably still suffering stress from the effects of everything. just keep an eye on those readings and dont do smoething to make em any higher.

now tell us about your filter? do you have a good earation in the tank? does your filter contain media? what type and how much? whats your pump size? compared to tank volume. dont do anything except for keeping the levels low and tell us these things. how long was your jar in this tank for, days, months, a year?
 
i want you to wash the foam filter again. in tank water. remove the carbon and the zeolite wank and add some bioballs or stones from your clean tank.
 
the foam filter pulls out wastes but they actually hold it in the water until you rinse it. its called mechanical filtration but it isnt cool really because it sits there and rots only adding to the load really.
 
ausarow;2350692; said:
if your water is still cloudy run your water through a 1 micron filter bag if you have acess. he is probably still suffering stress from the effects of everything. just keep an eye on those readings and dont do smoething to make em any higher.

now tell us about your filter? do you have a good earation in the tank? does your filter contain media? what type and how much? whats your pump size? compared to tank volume. dont do anything except for keeping the levels low and tell us these things. how long was your jar in this tank for, days, months, a year?
Click to expand...

Yes the water is still cloudy... :(

I bet he is stressed...the poor thing! Swollen face... is that a sign of fatality?? or something? Cause I'm seeing some scales are a little raised...

I will be doing a lot more water testing just to make sure the paramaters are constant. As soon as I saw the hint of seemingly raised scales i stopped adding aquarium salt.

I use 3 Aquaclear 110 for my 180 g tank. I don't have any other tank big enough to house this guy as the 180 is my biggest tank..all the hospital tanks are less than 40g... I can't possiby put the jar in it

I have taken out the carbon and ammonia stones..now it's just the sponge and the bio stones.. If I take out the bio stones form my good tank would that do anything to the good tank?? I don't want to risk my bichirs...

The Jar's been living here happily for the last 4 years. And we never had a problem until recently.
 
ah i see so its been there a long time. you can share some bio balls with your jardnii, just to clear up the water. just dont feed the bichars for a bit and dont take all their balls. just test the bichar tank after six hours to see if its still fine. it should be safe to do this.

seriously fish can go a long time without food. have your hospital tanks been set up long? dont they have bio material? when you added salt you probably had the zeolite (ammonia sponge) release its ammonia. see something went wrong and form there a succession of nasty events occured. you need to take it back to natural old conditions again. no black water, no chems. just sort out some biomaterial from somewhere. i tell ya i started a tank for my arow. i got new stored water and threw a bag of bioballs above an airstone and thats it. i wish i could just give you a bag of bioballs that are colonised.

the salt may have kiiled your snails. is there some material you can think of that you can use to fine filter the water with? like really fine foam pads? get a pump and stick a fine mesh over the end and capture the **** in the water. your water will clear and lessen the load. see that cloudiness is load you may be able to remove some of it.

also i want you to consider if there was a nutrient load under your gravel for all this time and now it just got too much.
 
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