Disaster – please could someone check my actions

Richie Ross

Hi,
We would appreciate someone checking to make sure I am doing everything OK with the following disaster.

Juwel Rekord 800 aquarium (110lt volume but about 90lt actual water) fully cycled by mid March 2009.

Stock:
Black Neon Tetra
Harlequin Rabora
Dwarf Gourami
Corrydorous Trilineatus

My previous post was about a problem with a male Dwarf Gourami and sure enough while I was away with work my wife told me that he had died on Tuesday morning; no snags and half expected. However, got home at 7:00am this morning and rather than going straight to bed decided to open the curtains in my sons bedroom and check on the new fish he had bought on Saturday. What I found was:

A. Tank water cloudy.

B. Large area of decaying mush that was obviously a lot, and I mean a lot, of fish food.

C. The internal filters’ pump was hardly pushing out any water and making an unusual noise.

I removed the pump and checked it, and it was fine on its own. I checked the first stage mechanical filter and it was the same colour as the mush on the bottom of the tank and covered in the mush. I changed the obviously blocked filter and that got the filter system working again with normal water flow (the three large filters after this stage were not changed and appeared unblocked).

I knew I would have to remove the mush ASAP but decided to do a water test first (Nutrafin liquid test kit); the results were not unexpected but alarming never the less:

Ammonia 0.6ppm
Nitrite 0.8ppm
Nitrate 50ppm

This is in a fully cycled tank where the weekly tests, the previous one to this being on Saturday, have always been zero for Ammonia & Nitrite, Nitrate 5 or less.

I immediately did a water change of aprox 80% to reduce all of the above levels and suck out all the ammonia producing mushy food.

1 hour after the water change I did another water test to see what the readings were after dilution:

Ammonia 0.3 (Estimated as below lowest reading of 0.6)
Nitrite 0.1
Nitrate 5

So certainly the Nitrite and Nitrate tied in with the dilution rate and while the Ammonia was higher than expected this could easily be due to accuracy of the kit and user error. However, this Ammonia level still concerns me.

I am told by my wife that “the pump has been like that since Monday evening”!!!! So I guess that my son hugely over fed the fish the Tetra Variety Wafers on Sunday evening or Monday and then probably continued to do so twice a day on Tuesday and Wednesday. We only started feeding these Wafers last week and I had already noticed that they are slow to sink and a few would get sucked into the filter, sadly while I was away lots have got sucked in and blocked the filter to make the effect of the decaying excess food even worse due to the very low flow rate through the bacterial colony in the filter.

At the moment, I have concerns over the welfare of the fish due to:

1. Approximately 3 to 4 days of massive over feeding, particularly the bottom feeders.

2. Ammonia poisoning and long term damage from ammonia burns.

3. Nitrite poisoning.

4. Nitrate poisoning but as this was 50, which I often see quoted as a limit but still undesirable, and has been brought down to 5 by the water change I am less concerned about this as a transient.

I am not concerned that the bacterial colony in the filter has crashed at the moment as there was a correspondingly high Nitrate level to the abnormal Ammonia and Nitrite levels but I will monitor to ensure that Nitrate increases and Ammonia and Nitrite rapidly decrease.

I intend to re test the water this evening at about 6:00 pm (10 hours after the water change) to see what conversion of Ammonia through to Nitrate has occurred. Based on that I will consider either a water change tonight or in the morning. I do not intend feeding the fish for 7 days.

Is there anything else I should be doing? e.g. another water change now to try and reduce the Ammonia even lower now that the source has been removed.

What is the long term damage to the fish likely to be?

Thanks

CyberPaddy66 · Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 6:28 pm Post subject:

Argh, I hope you don't get any long term problems, for my 2 pennies worth I'd stick with daily 10% water changes until the figures are back to how they should be, less sudden impact on the fishes may help them recover better than dumping them into clean water (or rather clean water into them).

Keep en eye on them and keep testing the water, with the pump working again the levels should start to reduce quickly, if you can get some extra quick growing plants in there I would, they will strip out the ammonia and nitrite a bit as well.

I'll let someone more experienced tell you in greater detail what to do but that's what I would do in your situation... oh and tell your son he didn't do anything wrong he just needs to be more mindful of what the tank is doing Wink

_________________
Life's a beach until you get sand in your pants!!!

Richie Ross · Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 9:42 pm Post subject:

Thanks CyberPaddy.
Just prior to your post I did another water test (only 6 hours after the large water change) and the readings were identical to 1 hour after the change. While I appreciate that this is not a long time and the limited tolerances of a test kit, I was hoping to see a slight rise in the Nitrate and hopeful a decrease in bot Ammonia and Nitrite and therefore demonstrate the bio culture in the filter is still OK. However, the readings were exactly the same and I was concerned that the bacteria had died off to a significant degree. Due to this and the high Ammonia reading (aprox .3ppm) I decided to lower the Ammonia and Nitrite levels with another large water change (80%). I hope that this is the lesser of two evils i.e. a second major water change (where effectively the water is the sam as prior to this change other then Ammonia, Nitrite and Nitrate levels) to drop the levels of Ammonia and Nitrite below toxic levels as soon as possible is preferable. I am now in a wait and see mode.

maximumbob · Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 11:43 pm Post subject:

I'm plant mad... but dont underestimate the benefit of floating plants.

e.g. i went on holiday for a fortnight and on return my nitrate level was <5ppm.

Plants will also absorb ammonia>nitrite>nitrate and can do so in a matter of hours.
_________________
Keeping fish is the same as keeping an Ulsterman - good food and water, the rest falls into place quite easily!

3 years experience pond keeping. Transferred to tropical 2005 as my toddlers wanted to swim in the pond.
Interests: planted aquariums, wild bettas, water chemistry, choc gouramis, CPD breeding.
Check out UKAPS!

Richie Ross · Posted: Fri May 15, 2009 10:27 am Post subject:

Thanks Bob,
I have checked the levels this morning, 16 hours after 2nd water change and they are NH3 = 0, NO2 approx .03/practically invisible, NO3 approx 1. All these readings are estimates as well below the lowest figure of the Nutrafin test kit (other than 0). These are also as expected just based on the second large water change alone so I will now do daily water tests until I am sure that the bacteria colony is coping/not crashed i.e. NH3 and NO2 drop to zero and Nitrate rising.

We have avoided plants so far due to bad experiences when I was a kid and to keep maintainance simple for Nicholas, age 6, as I am away a lot and keep costs down. The tank is "planted" with silk plants at the moment.

Richie

maximumbob · Posted: Fri May 15, 2009 11:11 am Post subject:

I understand the plant reluctance..

The beauty of floating plants is that when you have too many.. you grab them with your hand and put them in the bin..

My 3 year old holds the bucket and I plonk them in

Glad to hear that things are settling down and the fish seem ok.

As regards preventing over feeding; when i first left my friend to feed the fish whilst on holiday, i left a small spoon to measure out the feed. It was actually from an old orchid fertiliser that I scrubbed clean. Basically it was a semi-spherical spoon that was approx 5mm in diameter. I told them 1 spoon per day and it went fine. I use a small granulated feed so it was perfect.
There are a few tricks you can do to help people get the feeding volumes right (its a common mistake to over feed), using medicine spoons and other improvised measures to help is always a good idea.
I also only leave enough in my pot to do the time i am away - i have loads of empty old pots lying around.

Oh.. one last thing about your concerns re nitrite poisoning. Quite often there is enough dissolved minerals in your water to cope with a small spike in nitrite. If your general water hardness is above 3, acute spikes up to 1ppm are not damaging (as long as water changes etc are done and the problem has been located ...) to your fish.

For further information on nitrite calculations see this linky
_________________
Keeping fish is the same as keeping an Ulsterman - good food and water, the rest falls into place quite easily!

3 years experience pond keeping. Transferred to tropical 2005 as my toddlers wanted to swim in the pond.
Interests: planted aquariums, wild bettas, water chemistry, choc gouramis, CPD breeding.
Check out UKAPS!

Richie Ross · Posted: Fri May 15, 2009 12:03 pm Post subject:

Thanks Bob,
We have a pill box (compartment for each day) that I have bought to use when we go away for long periods so that neighbors, or at least their kids, can't feed them too much as I will measure it out in advance for each day; the rest of the food I will hide away. If we go away for a week or less I am not planning on worrying about feeding them (based on advice from our book that up to 2 weeks without food is not a problem and much better than risking them being over fed) or we will put in an Aquarian holiday block.

Thanks for the link on Nitrite. We have hard water but we can't add NaCl due to the cory cats not being able to tolerate salt.

Will look at getting some floating plants if the Nitrite doesn't drop to zero in the next 24 hours.

Richie

maximumbob · Posted: Fri May 15, 2009 12:31 pm Post subject:

The link calculates how much salt is already in your water. If its hard water then you will be fine. Water is termed soft because it has little or no stuff dissolved in it, hard water has lots of stuff dissolved in it (you only need to look in your kettle to see it). This will protect your fish, so there is rarely a need to add anything for nitrite.

I would also avoid a holiday block. imho there is more risk from water pollution than from starvation.
_________________
Keeping fish is the same as keeping an Ulsterman - good food and water, the rest falls into place quite easily!

3 years experience pond keeping. Transferred to tropical 2005 as my toddlers wanted to swim in the pond.
Interests: planted aquariums, wild bettas, water chemistry, choc gouramis, CPD breeding.
Check out UKAPS!

CyberPaddy66 · Posted: Fri May 15, 2009 6:31 pm Post subject:

When we went away for more than a week once I used the Tetrafin Holiday block (looks like pate not chalky) and when we got back over half of the block was still there, it'll help if you're going away for two weeks but a 3rd week may be pushing it a bit far... especially without any water changes during that time.

Glad everything seems to be settling down properly for you.
_________________
Life's a beach until you get sand in your pants!!!