what can kill a 17" ornate...

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R

rasdbo

420man
MFK Member
Dec 29, 2005
1,018
3
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near purple indo lake
in less then 4 hrs, did the usual water change today not seemed out of the ordinary about an hour later my ornate was swimming at the top no worry does this every now and then, go about my business and come back from the store to watch him doing the death spin in the tank and not being able to breath write. worked him over even tried to push the air bubble out of his system but to know avail he ended up going belly up and just floating in the tank. last night every body ate some live crawfish and frozen silversides when i woke up this morning one of the peacocks looked like they threw their dinner back up so that was why i was doing my waterchange plus it was the scheduled day anyway. IF ANYBODY HAS ANSWERS PLEASE GET BACK AT ME. WILL PUT PICS LATER!:cry::confused::(
 
what was the parameters of your water? Polys are very hardy. I left my 2 ft ornate in a buckent for a few days when i had to move.
 
Check with you local water supplier. Sometimes the do things that would shock you. I had a ph shift in my city tap water from 6.8 to 7.6. I was pissed since I didn't catch it untill I had 6 fish die soon after a water change.
 
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1 dies right when I get a new Endi. thanks james, I'm comin for the other now...
 
That is so sad ..sorry for your loss of beautiful poly.. have you fed these silversides before? Just asking since if they had spoiled and then refroze they could have been bad..
 
bummer no idea what it could be was it was acting normal before the water change ?
 
If your local water department just did some work recently in your area, they might add some chemical, or increased the chlorine to treat the water. Same thing happened to me on Monday. Did my usual water change, and my 10" Flag tail was upside down for no reason. He's ok in an hour later, though. Scare the crap out of me
 
There could be countless reasons for the sudden death, but here goes my best theory: Large amounts of protein-rich food (crawfish & silversides), some of which were regurgitated back into the tank where it degraded quickly, ejecting a large amount of ammonia and reducing dissolved oxygen at the same time. Combined with the increased metabolic rate of those fish that did eat and hold their food down (I've read that some large puffers' metabolic rate can increase by almost 50% after a large meal; this makes sense when one realizes a worrying way to lose a large healthy puffer is after overfeeding) dissolved oxygen can be used up faster than it is replaced. This would affect the largest fish more than smaller tankmates, as larger fish require more oxygen. Anyways, a large water change with tap water - which is kept in pipes NON-OXYGENATED and treated with a plethora of chemicals - can cause your DO to drop even further. Asphyxia could set in rapidly and the fish spirals downward quickly. Why a big bichir? I don't know, I always thought they were able to utilize atmospheric oxygen to avoid low oxygen conditions. It's just my best guess.

The other choices: pH shift from the large amount of protein excreted (tied to low KH), parish tap water having something noxious in it, or gas embolisms from heated water contacting cold water (the bubble effect in a tank after refilling with a mix of hot/cold water - all the bubbles that attach to the glass!). Come to think of it, it could just be bad luck and a combination of multiple factors that individually were not problematic.

I'm sorry to hear of the ornate passing. Time to grow some more out, right? :)
 
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