Rescued Tank - Dying Fish - Clueless!

[elleypelley]

Last week I rescued a 90 litre aquarium from a teenager who had neglected it for 6 months. The water level was down to half, the water was green, there was thick green/black slime on everything and the filters were clogged.

Miraculously there were 4 fish still alive despite having lived in that and then been kept into a Tupperware cereal box for previous 24 hours.

So we brought everything home and decanted the fish into a yogurt maker (switched off!) as it was the only container we had deep enough for the heater with the small quantity of tank water than we had.

I then cleaned the tank, gravel, rocks, filters etc with very hot water and reassembled.
I bought one of those new tank start up kits but it was a 7 day process. I didn't think the fish would last 7 days in the yogurt machine, plus I needed the heater for the tank... so I took a gamble and floated the fish in their green water in a bag in the tank overnight. They survived the night so I tipped the fish and some of the water into the tank (I read that it was good to use some water from an established aquarium if you can)...

All was well for a few days then one fish pegged it. Kinda to be expected.
Then the heater started to struggle... I bought a new one before the water temperature dropped too low but it did drop as low as 68 degrees.

Now I have a guppie that is barely moving floating near the surface and looking pale and a transparent silver thing (sorry for the technical terminology, I have no idea what it is) that has been swimming manically against the filter outlet for about 6 hours...

The one remaining fish seems OK...

Any ideas?? Is it shock? Delayed hypothermia? Have I got disease? Should I wait for them all to die and sterilise the tank etc somehow or is it rescueable?

Sorry - loads and loads of questions. I love the tank and really want to make it a success. Any suggestions most welcome!!

 

[Uriel]

When you cleaned the tank/ornaments/filter did you use tap water and did you dechlorinate it. If you used water straight from the tap you may have killed all the good bacteria on all the surfaces and filter.

Have you done a water change since putting the fish in the clean tank it is possible if you cleaned everything in the tank that you have killed all the good bacteria and are having either a Ammonia or nitrite spike which is effecting the fish.

Do you have access to a testing kit for ammonia/nitrite ?

Also alot of people have strong doubts as to the effectiveness of 7 day cycling kits.

 

[Uriel]

If you don't have access to a testing kit and you did clean everything with tap water i would reccomend doing as large a water change as you feel confident doing 50% with dechlorinated water at as close a temperature to the tank tempature as possible. There are a lot of people on this forum who know a lot more than me that will be along to post shortly though i'm sure.

 

[elleypelley]

Yes - I cleaned everything with tap water but the water I filled it with was dechlorinated. I used gallons and gallons to get all the gunk out of the gravel - should I have dechlorinated it all? eek.

I filled it with dechlorinated water. Should I still do a massive water change?

I don't have a testing kit atm, but looks like I need to get one!

 

[Curiosity101]

Hmm, if you cleaned everything with hot tap water I would expect to see a large amount of die off of bacteria from the filter.

Right now a 50% water change as uriel suggested would be a good idea. Make sure you dechlor the water before putting it in the tank, and don't forget to turn the heater and filter off (or make sure they will remain submerged the whole time cause you don't want them breaking!)

Also you need to purchase a liquid based water test kit to keep an eye on your water stats.
You are currently in a fish-in cycling situation... I suggest reading the two links in my sig, 'what is cycling' and 'fish-in cycling'.

I would expect the pale 'ill' look of the fish at the moment is caused by ammonia poisoning and possibly also some sort of shock, such as TDS shock. Ie. if the water level had dropped alot then the TDS (total dissolved solids) in the water would be higher (relatively speaking). Much like when salty water dries, it leaves behind crystals of salt... but before it's all gone the level of salt in the remaining water stays the same, but it more in comparison to the amount of water left.
Hope that makes sense...? Also hope I'm not insulting your intelligence!

Anyways, not all dissolved solids cause a change in the pH... so you could seemingly have refilled the tank with the same pH water but they were then shocked by the lack of TDS in the fresh water. Also the nitrates were likely to be sky high, where as the tap water nitrates will be very low.

If you've ever heard from people who've kept fish since 'before you were born' you'll often here how water changes are bad for your fish... it causes them to die. This is because awhile back, top ups were favoured over large changes, so the tank params varied ALOT from the tap water. Then when it came to the 'bi-yearly' water change all the fish died... conclusion (at the time): water changes are bad for fish...

Hopefully they'll pull through, but you can only do your best to try to keep ammonia and nitrite down until your test kit arrives and you know for sure what the levels are.

 

[Uriel]

I would reccomend doing a water change yes.

Here is a link to the Beginners Resource centre
http/www.fishforums.net/index.php?/topic/277264-beginners-resource-center/ Lots of useful articals advice for beginners

Here is a link to Fish in cycling
http/www.fishforums.net/index.php?showtopic=224306
This is basically what your doing now as you probably wiped out most of the good bacteria in the tank. An easy mistake to make. Trust me i have done far worse.

For a testing kits i would reccomend API freshwater master kit. they are available from ebay for about £18-20 if you in uk.

I would also reccomend doin a daily 25% water change until you are able to test for ammonia and nitrite to protect fish from either building up. I'm afraid no good deed goes unpunished.

 

[elleypelley]

Thank you - fascinating reading! I should have read this BEFORE I drove half way across the county on a rescue mission.
Still - even if they all peg it, I now know what I have to do and any new fish will stand more than half a chance of survival.

I've ordered one of the kits - express delivery!
(Chemist Direct £22.99 +4% cashback with Quidco)

 

[elleypelley]

Rightyho. So the test kit arrived today. Test results:
pH 7.6
Ammonia 1ppm
Nitrite 5ppm
Nitrate 20ppm (could have been 40ppm - kinda hard to tell)

So I performed the suggested 50% water change while sucking a load of crud out of the gravel then re-tested (dunno if there is any value in retesting so soon)

pH 7.6 (so I used the high level kit to take a reading and got 7.8)
Ammonia 0.5ppm
Nitrite 5ppm
Nitrate 40ppm

The guppie pegged it during the night
It had really red gills - would this be a sympton of the rubbish water?

Do I now have to keep doing daily 50% water changes until I get the desired results?

Also - dechlorinating the water - I'm struggling with the volumes of water - my bucket holds up to 10 litres - marked (it's a new bucket used just for the fish) but my dechlorination stuff wants me to be using much larger volumes of water, so I'm struggling to measure the smaller quantities of chemicals - how exact does it need to be?

Thank you

 

[Curiosity101]

At the mo you need to keep doing changes until you get the levels of ammonia and nitrite down to 0.25 or below.

I'd suggest a MASSIVE water change, around 80% ish to try to get the nitrites down. Then keep going until they hit 0.25.
And easier way of doing it would be too say... remove 80%, leaving say...10l in the tank? (ish). Then put 10l of fresh water in, the remove 10l of water etc etc. Until the 10l left in the tank is showing results below 0.25ppm for ammonia and nitrite. Then just refill, and test it daily, doing water changes when neccesary.

I'm not too shocked at the guppy dying, red gills is normally from ammonia poisoning.

What fish have you got left in the tank? Just thinking cause if/when you end up with no fish left then stop doing water changes and read up on fishless cycling. You could then get the tank ready for new fish in the fishless way (adding ammonia from a bottle as opposed to from fish), and restock in the next few weeks.

Edit: Dechlor needs to be 'relatively' accurate. Just to not risk overdosing. I have a 3ml pipette for mine... cause for a 10-14l water change I only need around 0.25ml of seachem prime.

 

[Bexx]

Am I reading it right that all of your fish have died now? If so you will now be doing a fishless cycle so water changes wont be needed now. x

 

[OldMan47]

There is indeed a lot of good retesting your water Elleypelley. You have water that is far too high in both ammonia and nitrites to be healthy for your fish. In your case a simple 50% water change is not nearly enough. Whenever I have any troubles with water quality, my first action is to drain the water all the way to the gravel and refill with dechlorinated water. That gives me what I call a 90% water change although it may actually be more than that. The end result is often that my fish are no longer exposed to water that has more than 0.25 ppm of ammonia or nitrites. Your 1 ppm of ammonia and 5 ppm of nitrites are both in the deadly range and need huge water changes, not tiny 50% changes. It turns out that your water has been ignored far too long and you are really trying to keep your fish alive until something can be done about it.
Do not worry too much about limiting the water change amount in your tank. Do a truly large water change that drives your chemistry into the safe range and your fish will thrive. If you do tiny 50% water changes, you will be doing them for days and days before your water is safe for your fish. It takes far less water and far less dechlorinator to do a 90% or 95% water change once than it does to do a 50% change over and over again and it will do the fish a lot more good than making them suffer less than adequate water quality all that time.

 

[drobbyb]

There is also the option of taking the current stock to your local fish shop. If you did that, you could continue cycling fishless and save you a lot of work.

 

[waterdrop]

Yes, agree with all the good advice from C101, OM47 and Robby and others here, its important that we begin to elleypelley with the basics.

An additional unfortunate concern, as C101 touched on, may be that if the previous owner of the fish did not perform regular water changes (and the evidence sounds like that) for 6 months or more then the fish may have acclimated to abnomally high mineral levels (high TDS) and trace element levels, something we call "old tank syndrome."

If this was the case and the move and likely exposure to much more normal levels occurred then my guess is that the survival of the fish is really down partly to their own hardiness to withstand this sort of change on top of the obvious ammonia and nitrite poisoning. It sounds like all of that is water under the bridge but if we agree with what I've described then it's also important for our beginners in the group here to realize that if one comes upon this situation in an original owners house (for instance) then it's one of the few situations where large water changes are counter to the health of the fish (the need instead is for multiple small water changes to simultaneously attack the toxic ammonia and nitrite but to attempt to slowly step the fish downward from the high TDS level.)

By this point in time I agree that the direction depends on whether any fish are now alive and whether they can be re-homed to an LFS or whether elley wants to follow-through with the fish-in cycle. (Sorry elley if I've missed the sentence that they all died!)

~~waterdrop~~