Oh Great.... Fish At The Surface Breathing Heavily...

[Shovelman]

Hey guys, so last night i re aquascaped my fish tank...so this is what i did.

Drained 5 gallons of tankwater into a 5 gallon bucket, and put my plants and 5 toxotes microlepis (freshwater archerfish) and my african knifefish into the bucket with an airstone.

then i took out the previous driftwood, and cleaned the tank- MEANING THAT ALL I DID WAS SCRUB THE ALAGE OF THE GLASS AND SIPHON UP SOME OF THE GUNK IN THE SAND
So after that was done there was only about 1/4 of the original tank water left so i put in BRAND NEW DRIFTWOOD, which i had rinsed off before, and put the previous plants back in the tank.

During the whole prcedure i had my canister filter running on the main tank as the water was not completely drained.

Now after i came home from school, i came up to see my archerfish at the surface with their mouths out of the water breathing heavily.

I just upped the flow bar from the container because for some reason it was faced down and there was no water movement across the top. I also added an airstone to help in oxygenation/surface gasious exchanges.

Im thinking its 1 or more of these three things.
A. The new driftwood is releasing tons of tannins and has vastly decreased the ph of our usually hard water, and thus the fish are in shock from the drop in ph. (this happened to me before when i added a diy co2 contraption to my dwarf puffer tank... and the puffers were fine after a day)
B. I might have stirred up the sand substrate too much and possibly released trapped gasses from bacteria colonies.
C. Lack of oxygen present in the water due to the out flow of the external filter being aimed downward by accident..
Im going to go do a water test right now and will be back with the results, although i doubt i ts anything to do with the ammonia/ nitrate/nitrite because i just exchanged with 3/4 fresh decolonized water..but i need to check the ph...

Anything i could do right now to help out the fish? Im really worried about them since they are my most prized fish... I <3 my archers!

 

[Shovelman]

ok so test results-
Ammonium: 0ppm
Nitrite: 0ppm
Nitrate: color indicates its right at about 0 as well...
ph: 7.8-7.9 before i rescaped it was at 8.0-8.1 but possibly 8.2 (a bit color deficient so its hard to read the tests for ph sometimes...) so there was a fluctuation here...but i dont think a
So just so you all dont flip about the nitrates i literally replaced 75-80% of the water last night so that's why its almost nonexistent.

So since water chemistry is pretty much normal i think it was the lack of surface aeration and thus oxygen couldn't get into the water...which explains why my african knifefish was unaffected since he can breath air directly from the surface...
And they have stopped gasping at the surface but are still breathing heavily since i put in the airstone and fixed the flow...would a water change help get things sturring a bit? or would that just stress em out more than it would help?