My gulper colony

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Must have been something in the water. Or the shrimp was bad.

I have seen boths situations and personnally had an enormous death toll once due to shrimp..

I would ask your local water company if something was put in the water....the stuff they dump in the water is unbelievable. That is why i tend to do wc's on sundays..
 
Feel sorry for the loss. Oh that's a pretty common thing to happen to this not so " hardy "species. The water dechlorinator and food very important. Pls stop feeding human consumption shrimps and fish meat. Best food for them is gold fishes and similar species( gutloading and health of these prey should be monitored) I have always felt sad how many of these cats are lost due to these reason. Most US and European dechlorinators don't work well on this species. If you guys have no choice then minor and frequent water change is needed. And these cats can be kept single or in groups regardless of size differences. Till date I have worked with 30 over specimens raising 4cm to 25cm so on and so forth although I did lost 2 when I first started out. FYI my work(maintaining saltwater aquariums for res and com) and own hobby resulting in almost zero loss in livestocks are all rely on Otto Aquasafety of Taiwan. Even full 100% water change for my current Jap ranchus pose no problem.
 
I had never experienced anything like this before and would consider myself as relatively experienced. I would agree with them being a sensitive species. Maybe it could be argued argued that live food is the best to feed any predatory species as this is how nature intended. However, I don't believe that you would find gold fish in their natural collecting points anymore than you would something from the supermarket. I'm quite aware of where I went wrong and now have changed my w/c's so hopefully I would avoid anything similar happening again.
 
j666 said:
Feel sorry for the loss. Oh that's a pretty common thing to happen to this not so " hardy "species. The water dechlorinator and food very important. Pls stop feeding human consumption shrimps and fish meat. Best food for them is gold fishes and similar species( gutloading and health of these prey should be monitored) I have always felt sad how many of these cats are lost due to these reason. Most US and European dechlorinators don't work well on this species. If you guys have no choice then minor and frequent water change is needed. And these cats can be kept single or in groups regardless of size differences. Till date I have worked with 30 over specimens raising 4cm to 25cm so on and so forth although I did lost 2 when I first started out. FYI my work(maintaining saltwater aquariums for res and com) and own hobby resulting in almost zero loss in livestocks are all rely on Otto Aquasafety of Taiwan. Even full 100% water change for my current Jap ranchus pose no problem.
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That post has so much going wrong for it. How can human consumption food be bad when it's just fish or shrimp? (Assuming they bought it with out seasonings and additives) you're from a different part of the world how can you be so certain and see "so many" fish die because of this? How can a delchlorinator designed do dechlorinate be bad for a particular species? And doing small water changes a lot he would still be required to use the dechlorinator. Gold fish is the absolute worse that can't be the best for any fish. Mass bred in horrible conditions live in horrible conditions and no stomachs so you can't really gut load. It must have been water :( or the new gulper brought something horrible in since you said you just got it. Did you qt? sorry for your loss.
 
Where I'm pretty sure I went wrong was takin such a large amount of water out and tipping the dechlorinator out of the bottle. I'm sure I put way too much in. Now I mix the right amount i a bucket and slowly add it to the tank and keep water changes between 20 - 40 % !
 
Oh. I can't really explain juz my years of experience of workin with this species. They are still my favourite species now. And yes juz my part of the world our fish and shrimp for human consumption excluding live ones I believed are treated with some kind of preservatives which are of coz safe on humans. Fishes here do get deformed or somethin when fed on longer tem.. Many sudden deaths could likely be the cause too. And sadly healthy gfs work juz fine for me till date. As for the dechlorinator I do try brands like seachem, API, tetra, genesis, Baxter etc and they do make gulper cats sick and even killed them while other species continue to strive. (Our water are pretty bad here treated heavily with chemicals recycled mainly from our waste water) And of coz lesser and more frequent water change is never as risky compared to larger water changes in one shot. These accidents happen in LFS etc. Back here in Singapore I estimated at least several hundreds of Asterophysus were imported these recent years. Even as many as nearly 100pcs of 4-5cm baby ones came in one shot by a single local importer. And I guess nearly but not all perished though. And what I heard from our local SA importer the reason these cats can drop from like $500sgd a piece to less than a hundred bucks per piece( $60sgd lowest regular sizes of 4-6inches) The main reason is other than Columbia catchment area instead of juz the previous Rio negro is that exporters and importers down to LFS owners juz want to clear them as fast as they could lest they die in their hands.
Juz my two cents worth and I do really adore these cats. :)
 
j666 said:
Oh. I can't really explain juz my years of experience of workin with this species. They are still my favourite species now. And yes juz my part of the world our fish and shrimp for human consumption excluding live ones I believed are treated with some kind of preservatives which are of coz safe on humans. Fishes here do get deformed or somethin when fed on longer tem.. Many sudden deaths could likely be the cause too. And sadly healthy gfs work juz fine for me till date. As for the dechlorinator I do try brands like seachem, API, tetra, genesis, Baxter etc and they do make gulper cats sick and even killed them while other species continue to strive. (Our water are pretty bad here treated heavily with chemicals recycled mainly from our waste water) And of coz lesser and more frequent water change is never as risky compared to larger water changes in one shot. These accidents happen in LFS etc. Back here in Singapore I estimated at least several hundreds of Asterophysus were imported these recent years. Even as many as nearly 100pcs of 4-5cm baby ones came in one shot by a single local importer. And I guess nearly but not all perished though. And what I heard from our local SA importer the reason these cats can drop from like $500sgd a piece to less than a hundred bucks per piece( $60sgd lowest regular sizes of 4-6inches) The main reason is other than Columbia catchment area instead of juz the previous Rio negro is that exporters and importers down to LFS owners juz want to clear them as fast as they could lest they die in their hands.
Juz my two cents worth and I do really adore these cats. :)
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Yes a lot of what your saying does make sense. A species that can be hard to maintain was never going to old such a high price tag for long. I have not been put of keeping these fantastic predators and have since picked another up. I am sure that the large wc and excessive use of the dechlorinator was the source of their early demise. I have changed my wc so that the hose only goes a certain depth in so I cannot remove more water than 30%. I also add the correct amount of the dechlorinator over the period the top up rather than in one go.
 
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