Mystery Death?

[natcat]

my cory julli died just today
and it was acting werid by swimming weak and not being able to move on occations, it also would take in air every 5 to 10 mins and then lie on the bottom .
but.. after it died and i removed it, i noticed it had rock hard fins (pectoral and dorsal) but not the tail fin and the body was like a stone ??
it that coz it was dead or did it have a disease ??
could the others be affeted ??
any advice welcome !
thanks

 

[waterdrop]

Hi natcat,

Don't know about the body symptoms but perhaps someone else will come along who can comment on those observations.

Do you use liquid-reagent based test kits? If so, what are your ammonia, nitrite(NO2) and nitrate(NO3) readings for your tank water. What are your maintenance habits on the tank? Have any changes to the tank environment occured recently that you think might be important to what happened to the cory?

~~waterdrop~~

 

[OldMan47]

A cory has a very hard solid kind of body and has sharp enough pectorals and dorsal that sometimes fish bags get holes in them from excited cories. Do you have your chemistry results as WD requested?

 

[natcat]

ammonia - 5ppm
nitrate-0
nitrite-0
ph?
havent changed the tank enviroment
but... just noticed the flake food in which i have been fedding for a week is out of its sell by date?? could that contribute!?!

 

[OldMan47]

The ammonia at 5 ppm is probably what hurt the cory. You need to get it down fast before it starts to take a toll on the rest of your fish. Ammonia needs to be kept at less than 0.25 ppm. You reduce ammonia by doing very large water changes. I would start with one so big the fish have trouble swimming because they are almost out of water. Be sure to temperature match the new water and use a good dechlorinator on it. After the change, the fish will be in almost pure tap water so you need to stay close in temperature to avoid shocking them.

 

[waterdrop]

Yes, agree with OM47. You need large water changes with good water changing technique as he mentioned. WD

 

[stelis]

by the time i get into this fish business i will end up with a degree in chemistry.
my test kit has ph,kh,gh,no2,co2.do i need an ammonia test to or is this one of these?thanks

 

[OldMan47]

Ammonia is sometimes marked as NH3 or NH4. The NH3 is ammonia and the NH4 is ammonium. It doesn't much matter as most kits just give a total of the two and don't really differentiate between them. A few have a pH conversion table so that you can tell how much of the chemical is in each form but the bacteria will not care. They process both kinds equally well.
Keep working on your chemistry degree Stelis.
No2 is nitrite, NO3 is nitrate, KH is carbonate hardness, GH is general hardness, CO2 is carbon dioxide, the same stuff they put into soda, pH is the inverse log of the power of 10 of the ... it tells you how acid something is. The lower the pH, the more acid, the higher the pH the more basic a solution is. A pH of 7.0 is technically perfectly neutral. The reason I put enough of the real definition up is so that you would see that going from a pH of 6 to a pH of 5 means the acidity of the water has actually gone up by a factor of 10 in terms of hydrogen ions not bound as a part of the H2O, water.