Questions And Can Anyone Solve The 'mystery'

[Anthillmob74]

hi there. new here and relatively new to fish keeping of the tropical kind.

short intro before i ask my questions. manners afterall.

have been keeping a thriving tank of 4 goldfish who need a bigger tank [as soon as we got the tropical tanks, cycled and filled them, the goldfish suddenly boosted in size. jealousy perhaps?]for just over a year and moved onto tropicals this year. as well as the 'fellas'. i have a tank [80 ltr] with 4 leopard dannios, one supposed leopard dannio though he seems to me albino IMHO. a red tailed shark called 'fergal', the plec 'big bob', yoyos 'giggle and tickles' [oh yes im a sad case, epc when you realise i have a goldfish called neil!!], one odessa barb 'barbara dickson' and 5 tetras whos name escapes me and the OH is in bed so cant ask.

we also have a 180ltr with 6 serpea tetra and 3 xray tetras.

my main question is we had 4 xray tetras. only got them monday of this week. yesterday i noticed we were down to 3. absolutely no sign of the missing one, not in the plants, filter [enclosed], under the rocks, burried in the sand, no holes, double checked the surrounding floor incase of holes we dont know about. completely strange.

its bugging me whats happened to him. cannot find an explanation at all aside from he died and got eaten by his tank mates who havent shown any aggression to eachother whatsoever.

have a snail problem in this tank and got some assassin snails today on the advice of our local tropical shop but reading up on here will they be ok? ive read here that when they eat all the other snails they wont have a sustainable source of food.

and how do they get on with plec or loach? dont have either in there atm but if they can live with any then this may change.

with regards the 80 ltr tank, my original RTS 'provident' [a loan shark haha] lasted just over a day. no reason for his sad demise but fergal is fine. so am i to assume dodgy fish? or the yoyos? also originally had 4 odessa's and 3 died within 2 days leaving just 'barbra dickson' who seems to be absolutely thriving in there and hangs out with the tetras.

the water quality of all 3 tanks is checked probably too much as we are newbies to this. probably every 3 to 4 days on each tank,and it is always fine. we also get it checked at the aquatic centre before buying new fish.

ETA - sorry...i meant to ask. yoyos and breeding. from what i undertsnand from google yoyos have never been bred and no one knows their breeding habits. is this ture? surely they must be bred somewhere. i have what seem to be a right amaround pair and 'she' spends most of the day in her cave and was expelling what looked like eggs the other night. most bizarre behaviour.

 

[waterdrop]

Its a very common story to not be able to find a fish. You may find some bones eventually...

~~waterdrop~~
ps. Welcome to the forum!

 

[Tropical_Fish]

Isn't that 80 litre tank a little overstocked? I'm new to all this but looking what I can get in my 70 litre and it's nowhere near that much.

The guide I have been following suggests 1" of fish (adult size) for every US gallon. So about 21" of adult fish in your tank, that list seems to be about 40-50 inches. Are they all quite small at the moment? How do you cope with the waste - do you over filter? Do you find the water is difficult to keep clean? Just interested as they'e some quite interesting fish and if there is a way I can have any similar ones in mine I'd be interested to know what you do etc

 

[Davo86]

Hi welcome to the forum,

I must admit I have to agree with Tropical_Fish, the 80L tank is simply overstocked, Also all apart from the tetras require a bigger tank than 80L, with the RTB and odessa barbs requiring at least 50G.

do you have any water stats at hand for us to see? tbh it is highly unlikely for the water quality to be spot on in an 80L tank that has your current stocking.

Also you may like to know that snails are a natural food source for yoyo loach (and any other botia species)

Yoyos and again a lot of botia species have not been successfully bred in captivity, When they breed in the wild though they need to be fairly mature so about 6" in length.

You say you have a pair but in reality botias are schooling fish that will stick together and tbh should really be kept in a bigger group.

 

[Anthillmob74]

Hi welcome to the forum,

I must admit I have to agree with Tropical_Fish, the 80L tank is simply overstocked, Also all apart from the tetras require a bigger tank than 80L, with the RTB and odessa barbs requiring at least 50G.

do you have any water stats at hand for us to see? tbh it is highly unlikely for the water quality to be spot on in an 80L tank that has your current stocking.

Also you may like to know that snails are a natural food source for yoyo loach (and any other botia species)

Yoyos and again a lot of botia species have not been successfully bred in captivity, When they breed in the wild though they need to be fairly mature so about 6" in length.

You say you have a pair but in reality botias are schooling fish that will stick together and tbh should really be kept in a bigger group.

we have been going by what we were told by our local aquarium guys but we now have a sneaking suspicion that although the shop is as has been estalished for years they may be talking out of their bottoms so to speak.

my OH tests the water quality and does all the water changes etc and has a testing kit that i cant make head nor tail of but everything is fine water wise in all the tanks.

cheers for the welcome. x

 

[waterdrop]

The vast majority of tentative customers would walk back out of a LFS without following through on their initial intention to start into the new hobby with a tropical fish tank if it were explained to them that it takes about 2 months before the filter is ready to support fish and that you have to do a little practical water chemistry to do it. This is one of the large factors that has almost unconciously led to the current business model where LFS almost universally ignore or reject fishless cycling. Its really more this I think than something that is actively negative against fishless cycling.

The whole new concept of fishless cycling has also come during a bad couple of decades (it was new in 1980 or so) for fish hobby retailers because all during this time the hobby has probably been in decline or has not grown so much with population for any number of reasons. I always suspect that any activity/hobby that requires patience, is calm and peaceful and relaxing as actually had more and more of a hard time of it as the business mentality of being always productive and always "fast" has been leveraged to an even more frenetic pace by computers and networking and has permeated our private lives. Anyway, its even easier for the LFS to ignore fishless cycling because they can always point to the "historic" method of cycling, that of fish-in cycling, and say its "good enough." Of course that's not true, but how's the beginner to really know?

Numbers are important, so I'd either obtain or have your OH post up the test result numbers from time to time so the members can double check that everything seems ok for you.

~~waterdrop~~
ps. did I say? welcome to TFF!