3 Week Old Tank, High Ammonia, No Nitrites Yet :(

[Zhoo]

Hi everyone,

I'm a noob although I used to babysit a fully grown cichlid and did fairly well.

I got myself a new 38g tank three weeks ago. The lfs staff gave me a bunch of used gravel which I'm thankful for. Right now I have 11 1"-1.5" fish in the tank, 3 bottom feeders and 8 baby cichlids (African). A few live plants and lots of rocks/wood for them to hide.

Everything seems to be going according to the plan, except for I have zero nitrites readings so far. My ammonia is spiking right now although there is no way to tell the exact concentration because I used Ammonia lock and Prime in attempts to bring it down.

Here are the parameters:

GH 180
KH 180
pH 6.5-7.0
Nitrite 0
Nitrate 0
Ammonia 3 but I don't know for sure

38g tank with an underground filter (1 powerhead) + an emperor filter (with sponge/carbon) running simultaneously with maximum aeration.

T around 80F

Once a day feeding with a pinch of thawed bloodworms

A few days ago the water turned milky white and the fishies started to show signs of distress. I've been doing 25-50% water changes daily with a gravel vacuum since then and they seem to be doing ok for now, except for ammonia readings are still very high. No traces of nitrites at all. I put more used gravel in and all kinds of liquid bacteria stuff I could get my hands on but nothing is changing. The lfs girl told me to relax and wait...

am I doing something wrong? (too much fish, I know, but I thought frequent water changes would take care of that)

Thanks for any input, much appreciated.

 

[Harlequins]

Have a read of 'fish in cycle' in the beginners section,you will need to be doing 50-75% waterchanges once or maybe twice a day to get your ammonia down.
Ammonia/nitrite over 0.25ppm are both harmful to fish,ideally you need to get it and keep it near zero.prolonging ammonia/nitrite in the tank in the long term will harm fish,shorten their life and even kill them.

Used gravel isn't going to help much with cycling neither will bottled products to be honest.

Perhaps you can ask your lfs for some mature media from their filters,

The milky water sounds like bacteria bloom from new tank set up.

 

[drobbyb]

Definately a fish-in cycling situation. Read the pinned topics and that will get you in the right direction.

 

[Zhoo]

thanks guys,

I did 2 large water changes today - 50 and 80% and removed all the wood from the tank because I heard it could lower the water's pH. The ammonia did drop significantly. Gee, I had no idea fish pee'd so much.

The bad news is that I lost one of my clown loaches. Literally. I have no idea what happened to him. He was always extremely shy, hiding inside the heater and he'd only come out at night. He was little too, about an inch long. I checked the logs I've taken out, inside the heater too, fluffed up the gravel to see if he was buried during the water change...nope. I have an undergravel filter with little slots in it so maybe he's at the very bottom...but then he would have gotten sucked up by the powerhead, right? I'm out of ideas..

 

[waterdrop]

Most of the ammonia is from the fish's respiration, not their waste. The gills give off ammonia as well as CO2 and since you have more fish than one would normally choose to use in a fish-in cycle, the ammonia build-up may continue to be rapid. You've done the right thing to get buys with the initial large water changes.

The next urgent thing is to obtain a good liquid-reagent based test kit. Many of us like and use the API Freshwater Master Test Kit. You can use the results of daily testing of ammonia and nitrite(NO2) with this to determine whether the percentage and frequency of your water changes needs to be more, the same or can be diminished. Your goal is to get the levels of both poisons near zero ppm via water changes and then test again 12 hours later to see where your are compared to 0.25ppm as stated previously. You need to be a bit of a detective to figure out what type of water changes will keep you from going over 0.25ppm before you can be home again and perform another water change. You can perform a second water change as soon as an hour after a previous one if multiples are necessary to keep the toxic levels within bounds.

The fish you can't find will almost sure have been killed by the ammonia levels and have been eaten or sucked into the filter or both, although its also possible it jumped out of the tank. Anytime you get above 0.25ppm and rise to 1.0 and beyond, the gill damage is so great that many species just don't make it. Normally of course it takes about 2 months to create a working biofilter and fish shouldn't be introduced until its tested and found to be functional. But at least you've found a place where the members can help and the guidelines are available!

~~waterdrop~~

 

[OldMan47]

I will go even further than WD and say that you can do as many back to back water changes as it takes to get things under control. Bigger changes are much more effective than small ones. When I have a problem from being too sloppy or misjudging the state of a filter, it happens to everyone sooner or later, I do water changes where I just leave enough water in the tank to keep the fish from flopping about on the substrate. I call them 90% water changes but doubt that I actually leave 10% of the water behind. Temperature matching with a really big water change become more important than when doing a mere 50% change but will still be fine as long as it is close. The hour between changes is only really needed if you are testing between changes because it gives the water some time to get thoroughly mixed before the testing.

 

[Zhoo]

I am going to do another 80-90% one this morning as ammonia must have risen overnight, although not sure what the exact values are. The fish seem to be behaving normally. Is this exposure going to kill the fish anyway? Bah. I wish I knew more before I started..

What sucks is that I still can't find the loach...if he's dead and buried under the gravel or the filter somewhere, it's going to poison my whole tank. I want to take everything apart and look under the filter but too afraid to disturb the gravel and all those bacteria I'm having trouble growing...

Still zero nitrites. How come? There have to be some at this point, at least a trace, but the test square comes out completely white.

 

[Zhoo]

Waterdrop,

how many fishes would be the max for cycling a 38g tank? I guess it depends on the kind of fish...I was thinking that I might be able to re-home some of them temporarily with a friend in order to reduce the bioload. I have a clown loach, an albino shark, and the rest are cichlids - 2 kribs, a jewel, a yellow lab, a mel. auratus, a livingstonii, an ob peacock, and a no-name blue one.

Oh yes, and they are all little - maybe 1.5" at the most

 

[OldMan47]

I am not sure what test square you are talking about. The color of the test bottle needs to be compared to the color sample card to determine the concentration of ammonia or nitrites. If you are using paper test strips, you need to get a decent testing kit that has the little test tubes in it. I know they seem expensive, but getting the wrong answer from the strip will not help you keep your fish alive. I am told that the strips end up costing just as much because you get so few tests out of each kit that you buy lots of them to get as many tests as a single bottle of reagent would give you. I use the API master test kit when I am testing, but there are others out there that are just as good.

 

[Zhoo]

Oh I meant the squares on the test strip that correspond to substrate measured. I have API 5 in 1 strips and API ammonia strips.. They are hard to read though because the colors seem to bleed or be uneven so I can never tell for sure. Is it green? Is it yellow? What if it's green on the sides with a yellow center?

My lfs doesn't carry liquid reagents. I'll go to Big Al's.

 

[OldMan47]

Although many of us have a good respect for the API liquid tests, their paper strips are no more reliable than anyone else's. There are not a lot of ways to test for each chemical using indicator dyes, so it ends up that many of the tests are the same no matter who makes them. The main variation seems to be in how well the reagents are mixed at the factory and how well the color comparison cards are printed.

 

[waterdrop]

Agree with OM of course, most of us would not be worrying about it being hard to read paper strip results because we've mostly long ago stopped trusting them enough to have or use them.

Fish-In cycling of a 38G would be done with a small group (maybe 5?) of minnow sized/shaped fish would be my rough guess. I'm not skilled in that black art as I've chosen to fishless cycle. But I don't think there's much question that you are probably pretty far above the amount of fish-body that would be used. Exceeding the optimal amount of course makes the water-changing much more demanding whereas under-shooting would drag out the weeks/months it would tank to cycle.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[drobbyb]

I think the old formula says 1 fish per 10 gallons of water, and it has to be a small fish like zebra danios.

 

[OldMan47]

Back in the day, when I did fish in cycles, I would use a couple of medium sized fish, like platies, to cycle a 10 gallon and proportionately larger groups for larger tanks. I often lost at least half of the fish during the cycle and really did not understand what I was doing. We never tested back then and everyone knew that large water changes killed fish, so we never did any. With our better knowledge these days, and readily available test kits, there is no reason to lose fish or allow them to live in poor quality water long enough to cause them serious harm. If you are willing to stay on top of the needed testing and water changes, you can successfully cycle a tank with minimal damage to the fish.

 

[Zhoo]

Well, guess what...after a few intense water changes and improved water quality I discovered a leak. Good thing I discovered it before I went to bed that night otherwise we'd wake up to find 38 gallons of water hanging out in the living room. So anyways, the tank got a crack in the bottom panel and I'm taking it back to the pet store next week and getting a replacement. I had to buy two smaller mature tanks off craigslist ASAP to re-home the fishies. Unfortunately, the other clown loach could not take the changes well and passed away

I'm starting with the new 38g tank next week and I'll do it right this time.