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I'm totally bummed!

You do know that ropefish (Erpetoichthys calabaricus) prefer live food. So your panda may be inside the ropefish.
Here is what seriouslyfish.com has to say:

Diet​

E. calabaricus is carnivorous by nature and will not usually accept dried foods in aquaria, though some specimens have been known to take pelleted varieties. The most suitable options are meaty live or frozen foods such as prawns, earthworms, mussel, bloodworm

Behaviour and CompatibilityTop ↑

Not to be trusted with tankmates it can fit in its mouth but is relatively peaceful otherwise.
from https://www.seriouslyfish.com/species/erpetoichthys-calabaricus/
 
You do know that ropefish (Erpetoichthys calabaricus) prefer live food. So your panda may be inside the ropefish.
Here is what seriouslyfish.com has to say:


from https://www.seriouslyfish.com/species/erpetoichthys-calabaricus/
Possible I guess but VERY unlikely. The rope is fed meal worms as a primary which is a much easier dinner. Also the Pandas were in the tank for ~6 months with no issue and they were a bit large for the rope to see as food. Normally a rope won't see anything that won't fit in its mouth as food. Along with all that I just can't see my rope chowing down on all 4 of the Pandas in one night. I also found 2 of the Pandas bodies. Haven't found the other 2 yet and figure they are down in the thick plants in the back of the tank.

No, the most likely thing is that I neglected to chlorine condition some of the water when I did the water change. I got my first rope 35+ years ago and have never seen them feed on anything larger than a feeder guppy or, now and then, a small feeder gold. Even then I had to hand feed as ropes are near blind and rely on smell and vibration to hunt. While predators they are passive predators mostly swimming toward smell or vibrations with their mouth open. Anything that ends up in their mouth being food. In my experience they will eat such dried foods such as protein pellets but would rather stick to meal worms.

I respect seriously fish but they are not always correct. For instance Seriously Fish states that they can reach up to 3 feet in length which is just not true even in the wild. True maximum length in the wild is 15-18 inches. In even a 175 gallon tank I've never seen them even reach 10 inches when in captivity.

Just not realistic that the rope ate 2 Pandas, and killed another 2 without eating, that were, on average, ~1.5 inches. If killed by another fish my cichlids would be the better choice but they have just ignored each other. Also the 2 I found were not physically damaged at all. One was just sitting on a branch of my spider wood and the other upright and sitting on the substrate. To be honest I didn't even realize they were dead at first. They just looked like they were chilling. LOL! Don't even go to the possibility of the spider wood being toxic as such a toxin would have killed everything. The spider wood was properly cured and has been in the tank for 5+ months with no issue.

The only reasonable option is that I messed up. I'm sad about it but things do happen. :(
 
OK- was just making sure since you did not mention size of anything. I would bet that the mistake on seriouslyfish about the size is not the number but that it should be cm not in.

Why would only the pandas be affected by the missing dechlor. Why did the ciichlids escape any harm?
 
OK- was just making sure since you did not mention size of anything. I would bet that the mistake on seriouslyfish about the size is not the number but that it should be cm not in.

Why would only the pandas be affected by the missing dechlor. Why did the ciichlids escape any harm?
Quite possible on the size error as 36cm would be a bit under 15 inch.

The rope and cichlids were affected but just not to a lethal level. Some things I've read may give insight. The pandas were wild caught while the rope and cichlids were tank bred. It would seem that tank bred fish tend often to be more tolerant as to water conditions than wild caught.
 
Oh, I should add on to my last post. What I saw as to tank bred fish tending to be more tolerant as to water conditions did not specifically mention chlorine. It was mostly PH ranges and such but I figure that it MIGHT relate.
 
Oh, I should add on to my last post. What I saw as to tank bred fish tending to be more tolerant as to water conditions did not specifically mention chlorine. It was mostly PH ranges and such but I figure that it MIGHT relate.
Possible, but panda garra come from intermittent streams in the wild, and IME they are crazy adaptable for a wild-caught fish. Like you said, I'm not sure that applies to chlorine, but...I still suspect something else might have happened. I guess we'll never know for sure. I think it was Gary that pointed out somewhere how seldom we know exactly why a fish died. Sure is a bummer when chance strikes a favorite, though.
 
Possible, but panda garra come from intermittent streams in the wild, and IME they are crazy adaptable for a wild-caught fish. Like you said, I'm not sure that applies to chlorine, but...I still suspect something else might have happened. I guess we'll never know for sure. I think it was Gary that pointed out somewhere how seldom we know exactly why a fish died. Sure is a bummer when chance strikes a favorite, though.
Sure, it could have been caused by any number of factors and I'll probably never know for sure but I still strongly lean toward chlorine as it just makes the most easy sense. I mean they died over night after a water change of ~40% and I had more chlorine conditioner the next day than I should have had or, at least, it seemed like I had too much conditioner left.

Fish DO die just as do all things but it bugs me when I don't exactly know why. Actually I've only had one tank that had zero fish deaths for over three or four years. That was a 55 gallon when I lived in Ohio that was all cichlids except for a pleco and a rope and used only under gravel filtration. Oddly the substrate was pebble gravel from a local fast running river and I very seldom did any water changes. That was a cool tank! When I get store bought gravel I'll boil to sterilize. With the river bed stuff I just rinsed well to remove sediment. Ended up with a killer tank and minute Crustaceans all over the place that the cichlids loved. The Crustaceans bred fast enough that they were always there. Probably the most healthy tank I've ever had and I did almost no real water changes except what it took to replace if I vacuumed the substrate. That tank also had a cichlid population that many would say can't happen. I had blue and yellow Acara, convicts, green terror and jack dempsey. The thing was that they all went in the tank as babies of no bigger than an inch so they just set up their territories early. I also made sure that they all had what the seemed to like. The rope had a slate cave system that I built to hide out in. The convicts also tend to like caves so I had suction cup fake caves mounted all over the back of the tank. It just all worked. LOL! My kid's friends would go out and catch crickets to feed my cichlids. Sigh, kids are such violent critters. ;) When I left Ohio in 1987 my kids took over the tank. When I left the tank had not experienced a single fish death.

I think that, sometimes, we tend to over think and over do our maintenance. In my specific recent case, if I had not done the water change, I would probably still have my Pandas.

Actually, with all I typed above, it is possible that I happened to just shock the tank's ecology. With dealing with a social security issue dealing with my benefits I kept putting off a real water change thinking I'll just do it tomorrow. The ~40% change I finally did MAY have caused a major shock to the tank's ecology. It kept going and was probably at least a month since I had done a real change. I probably should have done much smaller changes over several days. While I am not an advocate of major water changes in a larger tank my little 20 gallon cube does need them as it just isn't large enough to set up a self sustaining ecology.
 
The "love" is for the description of your cichlid tank. I've tried to get something like that going for years. My fish always eat all the crustaceans and refuse other foods until they're all gone. I like the idea of actually taking rocks out of a natural body of water and putting them in a fish tank. There's always the risk of pathogens or parasites, but there's also the chance of cool inverts and such taking up residence. I love it when that happens.
 
The "love" is for the description of your cichlid tank. I've tried to get something like that going for years. My fish always eat all the crustaceans and refuse other foods until they're all gone. I like the idea of actually taking rocks out of a natural body of water and putting them in a fish tank. There's always the risk of pathogens or parasites, but there's also the chance of cool inverts and such taking up residence. I love it when that happens.
A couple of clarifications...

1) I did not take what I would call rocks out of the river, I sifted pebble sized substrate from the river. This resulted in having a substrate that was formed over eons of water flow causing small and totally rounded pebbles.

2) What I experienced with the crustaceans is just not going to happen with 'modern' filtration. It takes under gravel filtration with at least 3 inches of substrate over the filtration plates. I ran ~4 inches of river pebbles.

Man, I know and sort of understand why most feel modern filtration is better than Under gravel but under gravel is much more in line with nature. You said that you would like to do what I did with my cichlid tank. You will never accomplish this without under gravel filtration. The little beasties NEED the deep substrate and water flow through that same substrate to live and breed.
 
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A couple of clarifications...

1) I did not take what I would call rocks out of the river, I sifted pebble sized substrate from the river. This resulted in having a substrate that was formed over eons of water flow causing small and totally rounded pebbles.

2) What I experienced with the crustaceans is just not going to happen with 'modern' filtration. It takes under gravel filtration with at least 3 inches of substrate over the filtration plates. I ran ~4 inches of river pebbles.

Man, I know and sort of understand why most feel modern filtration is better than Under gravel but under gravel is much more in line with nature. You said that you would like to do what I did with my cichlid tank. You will never accomplish this without under gravel filtration. The little beasties NEED the deep substrate and water flow through that same substrate to live and breed.
I use undergravel filtration on my 40 and my 55 gallon, half of my 29 gallon too. Only the trilineatus cories and german blue rams have sand, and that is a thin sand layer. I had a couple of rather large crayfish in the 55 a few years ago, until they moved to one of my ponds and later a lake. A deep well cultured undergravel provides more cubic inches of filter than most modern systems
 
I've gotten a bit confused but from reading this thread the speculation is chlorine killed your panda gara but if that were the case you would have corpses. My understanding is you did not find corpses; which suggest they are either hiding or eaten. Now i know fishes will eat dead fishes but if they all died you should have seen some corpses unless they were swallowed whole or the corpses are in there you just haven't seen them. To be honest in my tanks with medium large predators (festum for example) i usually find a corpse if a fish dies even if it takes a while - the only case this is not true is in one of my tanks will i have a gazillion and 1 mystery snails. They will eat anything to a skeleton pretty quickly unless it has an excoskeleton like a cory. Even in the tank with a lot of trumpet snails corpses tend to show up sooner or later.
 
I've gotten a bit confused but from reading this thread the speculation is chlorine killed your panda gara but if that were the case you would have corpses. My understanding is you did not find corpses; which suggest they are either hiding or eaten. Now i know fishes will eat dead fishes but if they all died you should have seen some corpses unless they were swallowed whole or the corpses are in there you just haven't seen them. To be honest in my tanks with medium large predators (festum for example) i usually find a corpse if a fish dies even if it takes a while - the only case this is not true is in one of my tanks will i have a gazillion and 1 mystery snails. They will eat anything to a skeleton pretty quickly unless it has an excoskeleton like a cory. Even in the tank with a lot of trumpet snails corpses tend to show up sooner or later.
But, as I said in an earlier post, I did find 2 bodies and the other 2 are probable down in thick plants I can't easily get through.
 
But, as I said in an earlier post, I did find 2 bodies and the other 2 are probable down in thick plants I can't easily get through.
Ok I missed that; surprise chlorine would impact them before other more delicate species you have. Btw mine never hide or even try to hide - they are one fish i can almost always fine right away unless they are in the very back. The female nijjensi is another matter - she often hides under the nurii rosen leaves and is 100% hidden - just have to poke a few fingers in there to uncover her.
 
Ok I missed that; surprise chlorine would impact them before other more delicate species you have. Btw mine never hide or even try to hide - they are one fish i can almost always fine right away unless they are in the very back. The female nijjensi is another matter - she often hides under the nurii rosen leaves and is 100% hidden - just have to poke a few fingers in there to uncover her.
Oh, I'm not saying conclusively that it was chlorine. I'm just saying that it makes the most sense to me.

My Pandas never really hid either. They would disapear in a cave or some plants now and then but not for long. LOL! They are too active to hide well. ;)

I don't know that I'd consider my rope or cichlids delicate, especially the rope. Still both showed signs of stress but just not to a fatal level. Actually that is one of the things that makes me strongly suspect chlorine. Within an hour or two after dosing the tank with conditioner they were totally back to normal.
 

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