think i can rule out fungal infection. took my water to LFS for them to check as a backup and my nitrates were up to 80ppm, needless to say purchased a new test kit and doing 25% water changes. Dosed with startsmart complete and then some seachem stability
Dead fry
- Thread starter AusPleco
- Start date
could it be oxygen level dropping in the night? reduce temp a little and remove a few plants? how crowded is the tank?
how long has your carbon been in your filter for? Try getting rid of it and use macropore/purign or a new lot of carbon
Last edited:
This is not a good solution. While it is somewhat immediate it's nothing more than a bandaid. You need to get down to the bottom of the problem and figure out why you have a nitrate problem to begin with. Adding de-nitrate media will simply help for awhile but eventually the media will become saturated and need to be replaced. Some medias will even begin dumping what its adsorbed back into the tank. Thus, you need to constantly monitor your levels and keep replacement media on hand.
Nitrates come from waste breakdown or some even have high levels in their tap water. If it comes from fish waste and you need to do 25% water changes every 2 days to control it then either you tanks are to oheavily stocked or you just need to continue with the water changes as regular manitenance. If you tap water has high nitrates than you need to look for an alternate source of replacement water or other methods to pretreat your water.
Just checked nitrates and reading is 0ppm for nitrate.
When i pulled the filters apart only one had a carbon pad in it the other had no carbon what so ever. So have only just added a fresh lot of activated carbon within in past 5 days.
I have a standard 4 foot tank consisting of an aquis 1200 CF and an aquis 1000 CF, 3 large sponge filters. I was previously also running an aqua one liquid filter which was 1000ltr/hr but has since been removed (before i noticed i had this problem??).
Tank currently contains 4 adult peppermints, 1 adult guppy and 3 guppy fry. I keep it barebottom as i gravel vac it every day with my eheim gravel vac to remove waste. 4 pieces of small driftwood and about 6-7 anubias plants.
The only things which changed immediately prior to this problem was the removal of the liquid filter and i didnt gravel vacc for 2 days. I removed the dead fry as soon as i seen them also.
I cleaned my sponge filters today and one of them literally turned the water neaarly black so perhaps the waste in the sponge may of added to it a slight deal?
Thank you all for your replies. I am going to retest my tank in a couple of hours after water change settles down.
The point to takingreadings before a water change is so you know what the conditions were after a set amount of time. For example, if your tank got to 5ppm ammonia after 4 days but then you do a 100% water change, after 24 hours you might not see the full extent of the problem. It is normally better to take readings before water chains unless you are playing with additives or similar and want to see what the additions did. If howeve you are trying to cope with ammonia, nitrite or nitrat problems it's better to take tests before water changes so you can see how you tank is processing the ammonia. After water changes the test will always turn out the best as the "pure" tap wTer will dilute whatever is in the tank. In other words, testing after water chains shows you how good your water is, testing before changes shows you how bad it is.did last reading over 24hrs after water change so would have settled