High Nitrites/nitrates

[Tortoise7]

Hi
I am new to the forum and to keeping fish. I have a 40 litre cube tank with 3 Cory Dory, 3 Black Molly's & 3 Guppies. I followed the advice of the aquiarium shop and left the tank running for 3-wks without the fish, and they tested the water and told me when it was Ok to start introducing fish. I started with the 3 cory's & 3 Molly's. Then 2 weeks later I introduced 6 male guppies. After 3 days 2 of the guppies died, so I went and brought a water testing kit and discovered that my water had high levels of ammonia.For the past 2 wks I have been doing small water changes twice a day. Today I cleaned the tank out and tested the water, was so pleased the ammonia level was almost 0% then I done the Nitrite and Nitrate test which have been ok, and they were both high, Nitrite between 1.6 & 3.3 - Nitrates between 50 & 110. I can't understand how this has happened as I only done the test 3 days ago and it was fine. I have just read that all my fish will probably be dead by tomorrow!!! help what should I do

Jane

 

[fluttermoth]

Hi Jane, welcome to the forum!

You need to another large (40 or 50%) water change, as soon as possible to lower the nitrites.

I think what's happend is that your filter has now got enough ammonia eating bacteria, but doesn't have enough nitrite eating ones.

Make sure the water is warm and dechlorinated. Test again after 10 minutes or so, and if the nitrite isn't zero, do another one...

Hope this helps.

 

[FishAreFriendsNotFood10]

to the forum for a start it sounds to me and what ive read so far that your tank is still "cycling" and that you will now have to complete a "fish-in" cycle... unfortunatly theres not alot you can do the bacterial colony needs to build up in your filter to support the fish you have there are a number of links you can read in the begginers resource center click here which may help you understand more im only a newbie myself to this and i hope some of the more experienced members will come and offer you similar/better advice....

also to my understanding frequent water changes can help the process along but as for your fish i think you just have to hope they survive

 

[Skins]

Hello and welcome to the forum Jane.
You have come to the right place for advice, i see all ready your in good hands.

Keith.

 

[Aqua Tom]

Welcome to the forum.

here is my admitedly newbie advice

The good news is that you DO have NitriIte Bacteria in the filter because they are producing NitrAtes which is why your Nitrate level has jumped.

You need to do an immediate 90% water change followed by a 50% change each day there after. Daunting & hard work i know but t least it is only a 40 litre tank. You must monitor Ammonia, Nitrite & Nitrate carfully as well, if they jump then you need to up your daily change to 90% to get rid of them.




over to you WD

 

[FishAreFriendsNotFood10]

over to you WD

im waiting aswell i learn sooo much just off those posts alone lol

 

[Tortoise7]

Thank you everyone for the warm welcome and advice. I will do another water change now and hopefully that will help. Will keep you posted

Look forward to learning with you all
Jane

 

[Tortoise7]

Thank you everyone for the warm welcome and advice. I will do another water change now and hopefully that will help. Will keep you posted

Look forward to learning with you all
Jane

I think I know what has happened. I brought a new brand of water conditioner "Nutrafin Aqua Plus" and I may have misread how much you put in. It says to put 10ml per 40L and I put 10ml in each of my 2 x 2L container of water. I feel quite stupid and very upset, that I put the fish at risk,it has probably stripped all the bacteria out, hence the ammonia level was 0%, and now I have disturbed the tank cycle. Done a water change and the bothe the nites are still high. Is it just water changes that will calm everything down?
Jane

 

[Aqua Tom]

Thank you everyone for the warm welcome and advice. I will do another water change now and hopefully that will help. Will keep you posted

Look forward to learning with you all
Jane

I think I know what has happened. I brought a new brand of water conditioner "Nutrafin Aqua Plus" and I may have misread how much you put in. It says to put 10ml per 40L and I put 10ml in each of my 2 x 2L container of water. I feel quite stupid and very upset, that I put the fish at risk,it has probably stripped all the bacteria out, hence the ammonia level was 0%, and now I have disturbed the tank cycle. Done a water change and the bothe the nites are still high. Is it just water changes that will calm everything down?
Jane

Yes, you will be relying on water changes to lower the toxins in the water, rather than letting the filter do it because the filter is not ready yet.

here is an example. the numbers are just randomly picked by me & do not reflect your tank.

say you have ammonia at 1ppm. that is for every litre of water in your tank you have one part per million ammonia.

now if you do a 50% water change, you will remove 50% of the water & in doing so 50% of that toxin, reducing the amount to 0.5ppm.

It will rise a little overnight but not too much, say to 0.6ppm .The next day you do another 50% change, rducing the amount to 0.3ppm

& so on, as you can see it is reducing the ammonia quite significantly.

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The reason we say to do a 90% water change first is to reduce the first high number, 1ppm, by 90% to 0.1ppm straight away.

Then if you follow the above your ammonia should be hovering around the zeros pretty soon.

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Hope this helps

 

[waterdrop]

No need for me to comment really, all good advice up there.

Good water changing technique has been mentioned above, use a good conditioner to remove chlorine/chloramines and roughly temperature match the return water (your hand is good enough for this.)

A good liquid-reagent based test kit is needed. Most of us like and use the API Freshwater Master Test Kit. Paper strips are too unreliable.

The goal in Fish-In Cycling is to figure out the percentage and frequency of water changes needed to keep both ammonia and nitrite(NO2) at or below 0.25ppm until you can be home again to change more water if needed.

Once you can go two days without changing water but detecting no traces of ammonia or nitrite with your test kit you know you are near the end of the fish-in cycle.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[Tortoise7]

Thank you so much for your advice. I did discover that it wasn't by putting too much water conditioner in the new water change that the nitrites/nitrates spiked. I am doing water changes and the the levels are decreasing now. The fish don't look in distress and are still feeding and very active, so hopefully we can get through this without loosing anymore fish. Will keep you posted
I am sure you will see me on here again, soon!!!!
But thank you again for your help
Jane

 

[waterdrop]

The way I think of it is that if your ammonia or nitrite is extremely high (maybe 2ppm or above?) you'll start to see some symptoms in your fish. As you drop below something like that (2ppm was just a bit wild guess, but something like that) and move down to a quarter of a part per million (0.25ppm) you are less and less likely to see any symptoms in your fish (your fish begin to behave normally and even seem what we might interpret as "happy.") But the scientists tell us that the permanent damage is still going on (gill tissue being damaged by ammonia, nerve tissue dying to to nitrite suffocation) in that low range even though we don't see symptoms. When we finally get the environment down in the 0.25ppm to 0.30ppm and below range, there no longer seems to be a case for permanent damage.

This is why (when you have a known ammonia or nitrite situation) it is a good idea to combine testing that gives numerical results on top of your fish behavior observations. And this is why many of us picture our Fish-In situations as needing very large substrate-clean-water-changes right away (using conditioner and temperature matching) to quickly get things below 0.25ppm but then probably not needing such large changes to -maintain- those lower poison levels for the duration of the cycling episode. Does that make sense?

~~waterdrop~~