Thoughts on a Super Red Sev Death

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T

TahoeFish

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Jan 20, 2011
179
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Tahoe City, CA
Ugh... my super red sev died on my birthday. This may be just one of those, who knows situations but thought I would ask you MFKers.

He seems to have been very healthy except for a slight deformity in one of the gill plates.. but just a shorter gill plate. He was about 2 years old and about 8 inches. He was not harassed in the tank with tank mates a rotikeil sev, chocolate sev, threadfin acara, senegal bicher, congo tetras, BN, and two SAEs.

Tank 125 gallon with a Fluval FX5 and a 486. Despite the filtering I think I have had some water quality issues as the threadfin recently got HITH recently. We worked through that using epsom salts and I was doing 30% water changes every 5 days. I think nitrates can go high in my tank. Acara is on the mend.

The other day the Sev was acting strange and breathing hard (only one in the tank). I did a water change and added a teaspoon of Seachem's safe. The next day, yesterday, he looked well. But I found him dead last night. I tested the water and nitrites, ammonia and nitrates 0 (could have been the teaspoon of safe) and the pH is the normal 8.2 which I know is high but that is what it always is.

I think that this may have been related to what I beleive can be a nitrate problem and I am now going to do the full 50% once a week, or the high pH will shorten the life of fish that are genetically meant for lower pHs or and this is the last bit of info.... I was feeding this Sev, because he ate from my hand, dried krill. I did not rehydrate the krill. He got it once a week or so. Could that be too hard on fish.. that the krill was not rehydrated?

Anyway, just pondering. Sad, what a great fish.

Thanks
 
I'll throw out a couple possibilities - probably will never know the exact cause of death though.
1. Looks like a helathy fish from the pics. Gill plates don't look too bad at all, but a short gill plate tells me poor genetics. 2 years and 8inches might just be all this fish' genes could handle. After all, all humans don't make it 80 years.
2. You run a pretty heavily stocked tank. I would be doing twice weekly 50% water changes to keep the nitrates down. Also look into your Nitrate test kit - it might be out of date. In an established aquarium, there will always be nitrates present. 30% WC every 5days w/ that stock list, your bound to have nitrates.
 
Few questions. How deep is your substrate? How much aeration do you have going in your tank?

Your fish seemed to grow pretty fast to be 8" in 2yrs. I might also suspect diet also as too much proteins and fats can cause internal issues. Another thought is that your fish was line bred for its traits and sometimes bad traits come along with. It could of just been a natural death.
 
I forgot to add that the FD krill was likely not the problem unless it ate a TON of it at any one feeding, could have bound up its gut, but you would probably noticed if that happened. MY fish gorge on FD shrimp, bloodworms, blackworms and tubifex without any problems. Sorry for the loss.
 
Thank you for replies.

Substrate is pretty thin because I always vacuum it up. I would say it averages an inch. Aeration seems pretty good with the two filters and like I said no other fish showed distress.

Is it really overstocked? I thought I was average. The rotkeil is 7 inches and probably nearing 3.5 years old. The chocolate is less than a year at about 4 inches and the acara is 6 inches, all others smaller.

Thank you for ideas though. Sure wish that much filtration would limit water changes a bit.
 
Not that it would have anything to do with your fish dieing, but why are you using a teaspoon of safe on a water change for a 125 gallon tank?
 
No I don't think you are overstocked at all. 30% WC weekly IMO is not enough for fish of that size. I shoot for 50% twice weekly - some do more, some do less. Again, check out your Nitrate test kit, if you are getting zero nitrates, something is wrong. Your kit might be out of date.
 
Big key to Nitrate kits (API at least) is the shaking of the bottles. If you don't follow the directions and shake the bottles well enough, you'll almost always read 0 nitrates and if you do it for long enough you'll have thrown off the balance of chems in the test kit so that even after you do learn proper technique, the bottle will never show you accurate readings. Took me 6 months and 55gals full of dead angelfish to learn this one...

Sorry for your loss, that was a gorgeous fish.
 
Could be genetic because Super Red sev is a mutant breed like the EBJD with weaker genes. Could be the higher pH water because sev came from soft water in Amazon basin.
 
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