Ammonia spike of 1.0!!

[Wannaknowaboutsand]

Here is the story.

I have a 55 gallon mbuna aquarium with a Magnum 350 canister hooked to a bio wheel 60 pro. I have a power head with a quick filter on the other side for surface agitation.

Here is my problem. I have a tank for some puffer, and I bought some ghost shrimp for these guys to eat. I was changing the water in the mbuna tank at the same time, and the container of shrimp over turned into the mbuna tank!!!!

There were 12 of them 4 where devoured quickly. two jumped out of the tank the other six hid. I managed to net 2 more. so I was left with 4 still alive and well in the tank.

Well of course as time past I would find another shell and another set of legs and the mbuna are really fat. As of toady I have am sure that there are 2 alive in the tank and one was killed in an escape attempt. It made it right under the tank light.

Freshwater fried shrimp.

So I have an ammonia problem now from all of the shrimp parts in the water. I water changed yesterday and it was at .5 I check it before work and it was up to 1.

This is compounded by the fact that one of the bio wheels stop rotating wihile I was at work yesterday. It had been out for about 8-10 hours. So I probably lost a good deal of bacteria.


I put some ammonia lock in the water today to tide the tank til I get home from work today.

My question:

IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE I SHOUDL DO?


oh yeah the fish seem fine.

 

[gto_cowgirl]

Sounds to me what started the ammonia spike wasn't really the shrimp parts but you losing most of the bacteria in the bio-wheel.

Do you have any other aquariums that are cycled at the moment and have extra bacteria? What i mean is, if you got alot of extra gravel in another cycled aquarium you could take alot of the gravel (keep under water), put it in some panty hose to keep it from getting mixed up with your mbuna gravel and tie it up then place it in the mbuna tank. That way you take bacteria from another tank to help jump start your mbuna tank without mixing the gravel.

Also, I'm not to sure about that type of filter but i use AquaClear hang over filters where i can put several sponges in each filter and whenever something like this happens then i just transfer one of the extra sponges from a cycled tank to the uncycled tank and it helps it jumpstart really fast. So maybe you can think of some way to do that with your filters if you have extra cartridges or whatever in one of your cycled tanks.

Next, you should probably start doing daily water changes as long as that ammonia is spiked up and try to get as many shrimp parts out as possible when you do it. As long as you keep up with the water changes then maybe your fish will make it through another tank cycling.

 

[Wannaknowaboutsand]

A bio wheel 60 pro has 2 bio wheels in it. So the fact that one stopped is bad but there is a second wheel the continued to turn the entire time so it did not completely uncycle.
Water changes will be carried out daily. In fact Ill do it right when I get home.


I was thinking about the problems I have had with this bio wheel an canister set up and It seems to me that where as my ammonia converting bacteria are formed in the bio wheel my nitrite converting bacteria fromed in the canister. I have to clean the pre-filter out and replace the carbon today also clean the tubing out to increase water flow.


Has anyone dealt with this kind of situation? Also I have some brown algae growing everywhere and need to leave the lights off to get rid of it. I have been scrubbing it off of the the decor, rocks and glass daily also.