# 4 dead but why?



## Coyote24 (Jan 26, 2007)

Ok,
an accident happened last weekend.
Saturday I decided to do a large water change in order to get rid of the Brown Algea problem that I am dragging since Feb.

I did about 80% WChange. added the water treatment and filled the tank back up in doing so I also added BA bio support (help the bacteria in the filter) and added BA plant gro... I then realized I added 3x recommended dose so I took a water sample and sure enough Fe was up to the roof.
I did 80% Wchange again and added water treatment and filled the tank up.
The tank became clowdy white within an hour or so.
I believe cloudy white = acteria are dead (???)
in Anycase I could not think of doing anything else. 
The poor fish were either at the top pf the tank looking for air or under the drift wood the fins going like crazy, they did not eat.
that night I lost a bleeding heart tetra the next morning another one and 2 golden algea, interesting the 2 that died are from the same LFS the other two were from another LFS and survived.
I did a 30% wchange and left it alone.
Monday the tank was as pristine as I ever saw it but suffered 4 dead...

What do you think happened? Are my assumptions correct?


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## MacFish (Jun 15, 2006)

No insight on your deaths but I wanted to say that for the last month or so, anytime I do a water change in any of my 4 tanks,my water goes cloudy white for a day or so. Doesn't mater if I change 10% or 50% although the more I change, the cloudier it gets and longer it takes to clear.


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## Coyote24 (Jan 26, 2007)

*Pic*

This is the tank cloudy...

A surprising thing:
The snail and the shrimps showed no discomforth at all, infact the shrimps jumped on the food that the fish had ignored?


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## MacFish (Jun 15, 2006)

Yup, looks familiar. I had a breakout of ich shortly after I noticed the cloudiness. I was also doing a lot of rearranging and moving fish around so I thought I had just stressed them out too much. 

I did lose a clown pl*co but I think that was due to the meds I used to treat the ich. All other fish have been fine.


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## Zebrapl3co (Mar 29, 2006)

As far as I know, that's call cycling. That's what happens when you killed off too much bacteria that help convert your ammonia to nitrite and nitrite to nitrate. Plus the bacteria that died, will decompose and release even more ammonia.
It'll take a few days for the bacteria to grow back to a sufficient size to handle the load.
One indication of that is that your fish seems to be suffereing from ammonia burn. That's when the ammonia damage the fish's gills, hence the fish can not breath and have to surface to breath air. Which they are not addapted to do, and hence die from the stress of trying to breath air.
The may be two reason to the cause.
1) During your water change, you add too many chlorinated water before you add the dechlor. During this time your chlorinated water managed to kill off enough bacteria to cause a cycle. I always add the dechlor first before I add the tab water.

2) It's spring time again! This is when we get a massive amount of bacteria in our lake, river, stream and reservoire. To combat this spike increase of bacteria. Toronto Hydro usually double and some times triple their chloriamine dosage on our tab water. That basically means we may need to double or even triple the ammount of dechlor dosage. Otherwise, you'll end up with chloramine in your tank which does a very good job at burning away fish gills as well as killing off bacteria.

Hope that helps.

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## Coyote24 (Jan 26, 2007)

*Pleco and chloramine*

Macfish,
yep I learned the same way as you regarding plco and Ick treatment:
pleco do not like that treatment product.

Zebra: Bingo that's go to be it. cause I followed the same procedure as I always do regarding de-chlore etc.
I read that somewhere regarding toronto water management and incresing the dosage in early spring..
So Am I correct: when the water turns cloudy white that is basically dead bacteria and the amonia spikes?
Poor fish, I do not think gills repair themselves either do they ?


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## Zebrapl3co (Mar 29, 2006)

From the looks of that picture you post. It looks like it is an ammonia spike. That also means, you'll get a massive spike of nitrite and eventually left with a nitrate spike. Keep an eye on the nitrate as you might have to make small water changes to keep the nitrate down.
From my experience, I make %10 water changes every day for a week to buffer out the spikes. There isn't much I can do. Also, if you have cloram-X, dosing that into your tank will be a quick fix for your ammonia spike. I think another product Amquel will also do the same. But these product do not replenish your dead bacteria. For that, you'll need time for you take to fully cycle.
Now that I think about it, bio-spira will fix this problem, but it's hard to get your hands on bio-spira though.
As for the gills, I suspect they do grow back .... eventually. I still have some fish from my last meltdown and that was more than 2 years ago.

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## Coyote24 (Jan 26, 2007)

*Zebra*

Thx Zebra,

You are right about the nitrate left over after the nitrite spike..
And just like you I prefer doing small water change I rarely do more than 50% per week, and due to evaporation from an open tank I add about 3L a day of fresh water to the tank.
This time I was trying to get rid of a brown algea proble I have and went too far...
Regarding the bacteria I added BigAl Bio... (?) builder or somehing, that is suppose to help feed grow bacteria faster.
Thx for the Bio-spira information.

never again, I hope!

a.


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## Coyote24 (Jan 26, 2007)

*well it happened again.*

Ok I will be a big man here and confess, hope this is for the good of everyone.

Lesson learned.

If you look at the intake tube of my filter you will see that I have a layer of filter material over the intake.
I use this to prevent pollutant getting in the filter itself and currently to remove the floating brown algea from the water instead of recycling it in the tank.
I have a few ends like this and I clean them with 1/10 javel solution.
I did a water change maybe 25%, yesterday to remove some nitrate residue from last weekeend meltdown and at the same time changed the intake end...

Boom the tank went white!

That could not be...
I was generous with the water conditioner etc...
and then I thought; the intake end, I removed it and yes there was a faint smell of javel...

Ok you can all flame me now,
I used material that I had not rinced properly...
so the filter basically sucked up water with some javel in it.

Stooopid mistake...

I am saying publicly just to show that when you get into a routine you can become careless and make costly mistake.

a.


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## Zebrapl3co (Mar 29, 2006)

Ouch! yes, that will definately cause a cycle as the javel will kill off all the bacteria in your filter.
Basically, you're cycling your tank again but with a fully loaded tank ...

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## Coyote24 (Jan 26, 2007)

*Water conditioner going bad?*

Hi all,

I was wondering can water conditioner go bad?
I actually lost the "cap" on this bottle so it stays open in the cabinet.
I am now wondering if Big Al water conditioner can become inneficient after a while if it stays open???
a.


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## Edward (Jul 24, 2006)

I have to agree. Changing water in Toronto area is a risky proposition. Wondering what kind of shit they put in because not even RO units help.


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## Pablo (Mar 27, 2006)

Coyote24 said:


> Ok I will be a big man here and confess, hope this is for the good of everyone.
> 
> Lesson learned.
> 
> ...


Thank you for the permission to flame you, which I will now proceed to do.

First of all, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to rinse ANYTHING with bleach for your aquarium, ever.

The most you should ever need to do with anything is rinse it in tank water in a bucket. Anything else is handled biologically.

Use foam such as an aquaclear sponge with a hole in it fitted over the intake, this works much better and is easier to rinse, in tank water, when need be.

BLEACH is a highly caustic substance with an extremely high pH.

Even a tiny bit of bleach residue would have sent your pH in your tank way off, and since bleach is concentrated chlorine, no doubt this killed off your biofilter bacteria.


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## Pablo (Mar 27, 2006)

Edward said:


> I have to agree. Changing water in Toronto area is a risky proposition. Wondering what kind of shit they put in because not even RO units help.


Your R/O unit is broken and / or you don't understand water chemistry.

I used to have an R/O unit and it worked just fine. An R/O unit reduces water to damn near pure H20.

You need to remineralize that and adjust its parameters to what you need before you can use it, unless you're mixing a bit of it with tap water to soften it.

Using Toronto tap water is not risky at all. Just use a good water conditioner like Seachem Prime that removes Chloramine, which is what they use in Toronto, and you'll be fine.

It's also wise to dechlorinate then let the water sit overnight to release nitrogen gas and completely gas out the chlorine as well.

If you're having severe water quality issues its possible you have bad pipes, which is a problem I share. In my case lead leeches from old pipes I have, so I use a cation silica resin in my water reservoir to remove (deionize) the lead.


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## Coyote24 (Jan 26, 2007)

*hi Pablo*

Thanks for the flaming.... I guess! LOL

Actually the story got better since I posted this,

I did the following test:
I took tap water and tested it
Iadded the BA water treatment and added it to the water, actually added more then recommended.
Tested it... Not a change in parameters!!!
I bought a new bottle of water treatment (not BA)
and that worked just fine... 
BA expiration date is Nov 2008...

Now try this, run your cold tap water get close and sniff it..
It is the strongest clorine smell I have ever encounter here in toronto.
After taking a shower your skin actually smell like clorine too.


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## Pablo (Mar 27, 2006)

Coyote24 said:


> Thanks for the flaming.... I guess! LOL
> 
> Actually the story got better since I posted this,
> 
> ...


Ya its that time of year. THey increase the chlorine level.

adding dechlorinator would not immediately, or in-immediately cause any kind of change in parameters.

If you want my honest opinion you need to NOT have any fish for about 3 months and learn the info you need to fill the gaps in your knowledge.


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## Coyote24 (Jan 26, 2007)

*Hi Pablo*

Actually, I've had aquarium for a bit over 20yr on and off.

The reason I posted this is to remind the readers of this site that if you get careless you might get away with it for a while but accident will happen eventually.

Two things happened here I think.
1- I did not let the water rest overnight before the WCs lately.
2- The water treatment failed or went bad or ??? (still have to investigate this).

So there you go, but hey, thanks for your opinion.


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