What's wrong with my molly?

I added new fish (xray tetras) to my tank a few hours ago, and now one of my mollies is laying on the bottom of the tank, not moving much. She's not visibly pregnant, and was perfectly fine this morning. All the others are behaving normally.

My tank is a 20 gallon long, and I just tested the water:
Ph 8
Ammonia .25ppm (spike from new fish)
Nitrites 0 ppm
Nitrate 20 ppm

The tank had a fishless cycle and was established. The mollies have been in there for about a week and a half. No white spots, no gasping, no other signs of illness that I can see. So what can I do for her?

Oh, I forgot to mention: I am using an API master test kit to test the water, and the temperature of the tank is 82 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm not sure which information is relevant, so I'll just post everything I can think of.

Hi and welcome to the forum

Fish diseases don't work that quickly. Adding new fish and having one sink to the bottom after a few hours is not a new disease that came in with the x-ray tetras. That doesn't mean it isn't a disease, just it wasn't brought in with the new fish.

If you have any ammonia or nitrite readings you need to do a 75% water change and gravel clean immediately. Any ammonia is bad for the fish and when the pH is so high (8.0), it becomes extremely toxic.
Make sure any new water is free of chlorine/ chloramine before it is added to the tank.

If you can post a picture of the molly and x-ray tetras, I will see if they show any signs of disease

Hello, Colin, and thanks for your response! Unfortunately, my molly didn't make it. Poor girl.

I didn't realize the higher Ph would make the ammonia more toxic! I had planned to do a water change this morning, anyway, but it looks like I need to do a larger one. Of course I treat all my water before I add it.

The forum is telling me that my pictures are too large to post with my reply. I will try to figure out how to fix that. From what I can tell, everyone still in the tank is happy and healthy, but I'm no expert.

My readings were the same this morning, so I'm off to change the water and clean the sand. I'll update in a couple of hours, once the new water has settled.

Is there a safe way to lower my Ph? I've read that live plants will help, but I don't really want to mess with live plants. I have terrible, terrible luck with plants.

If you set the resolution on the camera to a lower level (say 2MB) the images will be smaller and should fit on the site. Otherwise put them on an image hosting website like photobucket and then put a link here so we can go and view the image there.

With ammonia, it changes in alkaline water and becomes very toxic. Below 7.0 it is not a big issue but above 7.0 it is nasty. And the higher the pH (say 8.0) it is incredibly toxic even at very low levels.

Don't bother trying to lower the pH.

Plants won't lower the pH but driftwood can lower it a bit. I would just stay with fish that prefer alkaline water and do big water changes to dilute the ammonia and hope the filter does its job.

Omg, I don't know how anyone ever gets good fish pictures lol. The little boogers won't hold still! I'll keep trying. I don't see any spots or redness or fin damage on anybody, and they're all behaving normally. Is there anything else I should look for?

I changed about 75% of the water and cleaned the sand carefully. If I'd known what a pain in the butt sand was to clean, I would have gone with gravel! This is my first time with sand. It looks fantastic, but yeesh it's hard to clean without getting it everywhere.

I have well water and a water softener in the house. I've read that you shouldn't use softened water in aquariums, so I've been bypassing the softener and using the well water, which is very hard. I treat it all with safestart and a stress coat before adding it to the tank.

I have a Pel (sp?) 610 filter and a Whisper 20 gallon in the tank. The Pel is new, so I'm running both for a month or two to get bacteria built up in the new one before removing the Whisper.

I've been testing the water daily, because I worry, and doing partial water changes every couple of days. The tank has been stable for a week, until yesterday. I'll keep monitoring it for ammonia spikes until it adjusts to the new fish.

I've been considering driftwood anyway, and if it can help the Ph that's more reason to try it. I know I need to boil it before adding it, but is there anything else I should be concerned with?

See if the fish have any cream, white or grey patches on their body. These are either poor water quality or protozoan infections.

Driftwood only needs to be rinsed and soaked until it sinks. Boiling helps it sink sooner.

Cleaning sand is easy enough, just use a gravel cleaner and kink the hose a bit to stop the sand being drained out.

Oh, I didn't think to kink the hose, lol! Well, next time.

Nobody has any patches or discoloration of any kind, so far. I'll keep watching, though.

if all the other fish look clean and don't show any issues, it was probably the ammonia and the high pH.

Sigh... well now I see white spots on two of my other mollies' tails. Looks like ich to me. Poor little things.

I'm raising the temperature to 84 (for now) and heading out to get aquarium salt. Any advice would be much appreciated.

Post a pic of them, whitespot doesn't normally appear that quickly after new fish have been added.

You can use any sort of non iodised salt including rock salt, sea salt or swimming pool salt. But salt isn't normally needed for Ich. It's just a matter of getting the temperature up to 30C (86F) and keep it there for 2 weeks. Increase aeration to maximise the oxygen in the water. Warmer water holds less oxygen than cool water so surface turbulence/ aeration is essential.

There is more info on Ich at the following link. The first post on page 1 and the last post on page 2 are the bits to read.
http://www.fishforums.net/threads/what-is-ich.7092/page-2

Well I'm out of the house now. It's possible I just didn't see it before, but that seems unlikely to me. It looks like someone salted their little tails. The black one has a few visible, tiny white spots on her top as well.

I'm raising the temperature gradually right now. I'll raise it up to 86 in a couple of hours, and try for pics when I get back home.

I could only get clear- ish pictures of the black molly. My dalmatian and silver also have a few spots on their tails. The tank is well aerated, and I've turned the heater up to 86 now.

I bought some aquarium salt and some ich treatment but haven't put either one in the tank. I just retested the water and both ammonia and nitrates are at zero. Seems like that's all I should do for now...

That fish is really unhappy, clamped fins, excess mucous on the body (cream colour on the side of the fish).

Do you know how hard the well water is, what is the general hardness (GH)?
If you don't have a GH test kit you can get the local petshop to test it for you.

Mollies need water with a general hardness over 250ppm. If it's less than that they will have issues.

You can add some salt, use 1 heaped tablespoon per 20 litres of water. The salt can help relax the fish and reduces some of the stress.

To work out the volume of water in the tank:
measure length x width x height in cm.
divide by 1000.
= volume in litres.

When you measure the height, measure from the top of the gravel to the top of the water level.

There is a calculator/ converter in the "How To Tips" at the top of this page that will convert litres to gallons if you need it.

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Do not add the ich medication with the high temperature. Any medications will reduce the oxygen levels in the tank water even more than it already is. The stress of low oxygen levels and warm water can be too much for some fish. Just keep the water at 30C (86F) for the next 2 weeks and see how they go.

If it is whitespot (Ich), the whitespots should drop off the fish in the next 24-48 hours. The parasites will then sit in the gravel where they multiply inside the whitespot cyst, before hatching out and swimming around the aquarium. They should be killed by the warm water at that free swimming stage.