Weird Death

Oh no! Sick fish?! Come here and see if someone can help!
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Read this before posting!!

Since this board has been up, we have found there are several questions that routinely get asked in order to help diagnose problems. If you can have that information to begin with in your post, we'll be able to help right away (if we can!) without having to wait for you to post the info we need.

1) Your water parameters - pH, Ammonia, Nitrite, Nitrates and salinity (if appropriate). This is by far the most important information you can provide! Do not answer this with "Fine" "Perfect" "ok", that tells us nothing. We need hard numbers.

2) Tank size and a list of ALL inhabitants. Include algae eaters, plecos, everything. We need to know what you have and how big the tank is.

3) Feeding, water change schedule and a list of all products you are using or have added to the tank (examples: Cycle, Amquel, salt, etc)

4) What changes you've made in the tank in the last week or so. Sometimes its the little things that make all the difference.

5) How long the aquarium has been set up, and how did you cycle it? If you don't know what cycling is read this: Fishless Cycling Article and familiarize yourself with all the information. Yes. All of it.

We want to help, and providing this information will go a LONG way to getting a diagnosis and hopeful cure that much faster.

While you wait for assistance:
One of the easiest and best ways to help your fish feel better is clean water! If you are already on a regular water change schedule (50% weekly is recommended) a good step to making your fish more comfortable while waiting for diagnosis/suggestions is to do a large water change immediately. Feel free to repeat daily or as often as you can, clean water is always a good thing! Use of Amquel or Prime as a dechlor may help with any ammonia or nitrite issues, and is highly recommended.

Note - if you do not normally do large water changes, doing a sudden, large water change could shock your fish by suddenly changing their established water chemistry. Clean water is still your first goal, so in this case, do several smaller (10%) water changes over the next day or two before starting any large ones.
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Salmon
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Re: Weird Death

Post by Salmon »

True, but I'm thinking he read his test wrong.
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Re: Weird Death

Post by eieio »

Salmon wrote:True, but I'm thinking he read his test wrong.
if you thought he read his tests wrong, why would you back him up with your post as you did?
Salmon wrote:I was told nitrites were at .5 ppm and that may have had a slight effect towards the fish dying, but seeing as how thats not terribly high I don't see how that would have killed them, even though it is supposed to be at 0ppm.
.5 ppm nitrites is a terribly serious problem, and likely indicative of other serious problems
rather than gloss over it, wouldn't it make more sense to get to the root of the problem before there is more suffering & death? :roll:
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Re: Weird Death

Post by Pufferpunk »

So many folks transpose nitrite & nitrate readings, when they post here.
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Re: Weird Death

Post by muffinman3560 »

There Nitrite was at .5, so i did a water change of 80%. The next day i did another test and it was 0. Shouldn't there be nitrite in the water still? also i could of messed up the test by doing something wrong who knows.
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Re: Weird Death

Post by sevenyearnight »

Ammonia - 0
NitrIte NO2 - 0
NitrAte NO3 - Below 20
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Re: Weird Death

Post by muffinman3560 »

sevenyearnight wrote:Ammonia - 0
NitrIte NO2 - 0
NitrAte NO3 - Below 20
Yea we know, why did you post that?
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Re: Weird Death

Post by Pufferpunk »

Shouldn't there be nitrite in the water still?
She misunderstood your Q. It sounded like you thought there should always be nitrite. If you cut 0.5 in half, it may not be quite detectable by your test kit. The fact that you show no nitrate means the tank is not cycled.
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Re: Weird Death

Post by sevenyearnight »

+1
That is what I thought you were asking.
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Re: Weird Death

Post by Flutter »

If your tank has beneficial bacteria then you might have lowered the nitrite enough for the bacteria to take care of the rest. This would give you a 0 nitrite reading.
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