Need Help - Blue Ram Keeps Hiding!

I Have noticed my female blue ram has started to hide at the back of my 34L planted tank and refusing to eat. She comes out occasionally but goes straight back to her hiding spot and wont move for hours unless the other gold ram is poking about

At the beginning of the week one of my newly aquired gold rams suddently died (for no reason!) and i put it down to stress from moving to a new tank.

I have 1 other gold ram in the tank thats happy as larry, along with 2 male guppies and 2 male endler guppies (to keep the rams company) and some shrimp.

I thought i should do a test on the water conditions and found this out today:

pH 8.5
Ammonia 0.0
Nitrite 0.1
Nitrate 75mg/l
gH 60ppm
kH 90

I can see my pH is higher than it should be and so is my nitrate. Would this be the cause of the sudden death and my blue ram hiding away and not eating?
In terms of colouration shes fine and still has her pink belly, but i also noticed both her eyes are slightly swollen, but not swollen like popeye(yet!)

I dont want to lose my female ram as i want to introduce a male ram to the tank, but i dont want to if theres something wrong with the water!

Any help will be greatly appreciated!!!

(ps.... i also noticed that my gold ram loves to goto the airstone and 'eat' the bubbles, and spits it out a few moments later. shes been doing it all day! is this normal?)

Rams are fussy about water, and this is where I'm placing my bets. NitrIte is high. Any detectable level of nitrIte is too much for Rams, as they are sencitive to nitrogenous waste. How long has your tank been running?
Nitrate is also high, as you mention, possibly too high for Rams. What is your water change regeme like? What is the reading of nitrate in the tap water?
pH is again possibly too high for Rams. It needs to be lower realy, but there are only a few ways of doing this.. Peat in the filter would be my prefured method, but you need to remove carbon, and add it slowly to get the pH right It will make the tank go a browny colour. It often brings out better colours in your fish. You can use part RO, but considering the hardness values, this would risk pH swings

Are you using dip strips? The GH reading, or KH reading, or both, is incorrect. KH is a measure of carbonate salts in the water. GH is a measure of carbonate salts in the water and magnesium salts. GH must match the KH, or be higher. It is not theoretically possible to have a GH lower than the KH, as the GH is the sum of the KH and another compound. If it is a liquid kit, it is either faulty or an inaccurate kit. My advise would be to switch brands, unless these readings of hardness are "unusual" If it is test strips, get a liquid kit, as strips are notoriously inaccurate

All the best
Rabbut

this setup has only been running a couple of months, but the tank itself has been running about 2years. i stripped it down from a guppy colony and changed substrate to TETRAPLANT COMPLETESUBSTRATE with peagravel on top, with plantamin added every week. i do a 30% water change each week (adding tapsafe to each bucketload) and i use a softening pillow to bring down the gh.
unsure of the nitrate of the tap water, will test tomorrow when back home.

I was looking at products to bring down the nitrate and ph, and i found tetra nitrateMinus, and ph buffer 7.2...would these be wise to add after a water change?

As for the tests, the gh and kh is a liquid test, adding drops til the water changes colour, and the rest was done with tablet tests. Ive done tests with the gh, where i tested the tap water and it recorded 160ppm, then after running the softening pillow it is reduced to 60ppm...so i think that test works, so maybe i did kh one wrong?

I'll upload a pic of the tank as it was a couple weeks ago (sorry havent got camera on me right now to upload todays pics) so you can see the kind of setup i have.

Tetra Nitrate Minus has had some good reviews, though I have never used it personaly. I think that should be a good product to try allong side the waterchanges

Leave the pH and hardness buffers on the shelf, as they tend to make the pH swing. Fish can adapt to a constant pH outside the idea range more easily than they can adapt to a fluctuating pH with in the ideal range. To change pH downwards, you either need to use peat, or you need to get RO/DI water, and mix in minerals/tap water to add KH (possibly GH aswell depending on what you are keeping) and some other trace elements, to keep the pH stable and the fish healthy.
Using RO is a risk if you don't understand water chemistory fully, hence my surgestion to use peat. Allow the hardness of the water to raise if you add peat, as it will reduce the risk of the pH dropping too far. If you opt for RO/DI, do plenty of research into the link between GH, KH, TDS and pH, so that you don't make any errors that cost fish lives

HTH
Rabbut

Oh i feel like such a fool!

I only added in the pillow this week, the week before the blue ram was fine!

Well i took it out earier today to recharge it, so i think i wont be adding it back again anytime soon, that would explain the sudden rise in pH!!

And as for peat, i do actually have some blackwater extract that i used when i recycled the tank, but i dont use it much as it makes the tank go brown for a couple days!
But i will go and get some peat and/or more blackwater extract (hopefully lfs will be open bank holiday monday!)

btw, do u know the answer to my question about my bubble eating gold ram??

It could just be a weird habit that it's developed, it's certainly not anything that is ringging alarm bells with me. The pH swinging is almost certainly down to the pillow Black water extract and peat will both discolour the water, but this is what these fish would be used to in the wild

All the best
Rabbut

Ok i did a 25% water change yesterday and added in the nitrate minus

Come back to check on tank today, and i notice the blue ram outside her usual hiding place, yay!

But, not all good news.....after looking at her closely , it looks like she has a fat lip? Shes still being a bit distanced from everyone else and cant see her eating when i put a bit of bloodworm in, so getting a little worried now!

I took a pic so you can take a look for yourselves

Hum... can't realy see either swellings from the pic, but if you say they are there, you can probibly judge it better than us. The swelling of eyes is usualy internal bacteria, but I don't think that a swolen lip is a symptom of this infection type. Sorry, but I don't know what you are dealing with for sure here, so can't make any recomendations, other than regular (say 20% daily) waterchanges untill it issue is identifyed

All the best
Rabbut