Hey everyone, so I come home from work today, and I notice my fish gasping at the top. I see that the spray bar from my eheim is no longer hovering over the surface, but rather got knocked into the water. Ok, easy enough, my trimac has done it before, gets a bit rowdy in the tank sometimes. Then I notice one of my altifrons floating in the corner, goner. Crap, where are the other 2? One under the driftwood..gone, the other in the bottom corner...gone. Are altifrons sensitive to low oxygen levels? they werent attacked, no marks on them. Kinda pissed, they were really starting to look nice, and the trimac pretty much left them alone except for an occasional chase at feeding time.
Trimac killed my geos....but not how you think
- Thread starter Andicca
- Start date
I dont see that killing fish. I never use a spray bar and my output tubes are under the surface. Unless the filter was off I doubt o2 would get low enough to kill those fish. Sorry for your loss though
I agree. Before I elevated my power strip, my cat used to occasionally shut off the power to my 125, including my canister filter. It was off for hours on occasion and I never lost any geos. I have very little surface agitation in some of my other tanks with no problems. Not sure about geos, but apistos and some others actually prefer little to no surface agitation.
Did the trimac survive but the rest didn't? I've had spray bars and bubblers stop working for over 12 hours and the fish survived. Sometimes fish die from pure stress like being chased. Geos are pretty sensitive to stress, so if that trimac was chasing them all day long that could have done it. The trimac wouldn't even need to bite them to kill. Heavy breathing is a sign of stress too, and not always low oxygen. I would avoid mixing aggressive CAs with geos.
Yes I have had that happen too. You often don't see any damage to the fish. I had a banded leporinus get spooked and hit the glass hard. It was breathing but laying on the bottom on its side. It died later on.
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I guarantee they died from oxygen starvation. Geos come from well oxygenated, flowing rivers, not ponds or lakes that can stagnate and get very warm. I have lost geos several times ( I almost get sick when I think of it) when a power filter or power head stopped from a power outage and failed to start up when the power came back on. Most often it was just the Geophagus that perished, the others maybe suffering but surviving. I now have an air stone with lots of air in tanks with geos (and my other tanks too for that matter). It was interesting that a few months back, a person like yourself lost some Tapajos, I believe. I responded that an air supply is a must. You wouldn't believe the number of responses that said basically I was "full of it" and didn't really know what I was talking about. Any mechanical device supplying air through water agitation and not an actual air supply is asking for trouble eventually. My question is, who would not want to put an air supply in a tank? Is it that much trouble or too costly. It could be in the form of a sponge filter or air stone.
good to note, Jim. I've never lost geos to that cause, but have seen that they are the first to start breathing hard if surface agitation diminishes at all. and the first to respond favorably to increased oxygenation.
I've also lost high oxygen requiring fish to a pump failure within 24 hours, first to go for me were Tomocichla asfaci, then an Acarichthys.
But I believe having a trimac with Geos was a time bomb waiting to happen, Geos are really not capable of coping with the aggression of a northern Central American with the attitude of a trimac or some of the others in its category.
But I believe having a trimac with Geos was a time bomb waiting to happen, Geos are really not capable of coping with the aggression of a northern Central American with the attitude of a trimac or some of the others in its category.