The Strangest Thing I've Ever Seen!

[Brianne-xx]

Me and my boyfriend bought some goldfish from a shop for my boyfriends little brothers birthday. When we bought them, we thought they looked healthy, which is why we picked them. I had to put them in a bucket overnight, because we had to give them to him te next day. Obviously I put the bag in first so they could get used to the water. I put dechlorinator in as well. My boyfriends mum and dad had been cycling the tank for quite a while in secret, putting filter aid and bacteria stuff in to build it up, and doing regular water checks. When I put them in the bucket, they just stayed at the bottom of the water, so I thought it's a new tank, they must just be scared and shy. They only come up when I gave them food. Then we put them in the tank the next day for my boyfriends brother, making sure they got used to the water. They stayed at the bottom of the tank, and only come up when we fed them. We got a fish feeder to put them little worms in, and still doing regular water checks. Then the worm feeder fell down, and one of the fish were hiding in it. My boyfriends dad was watching the fish last night, and they were doing what they normally do. Then this morning, one of the fishes scales were sort of shedding, and the other fish was eating it's face and body, where the shedding was. It died, and it looked a mess! It's face looked like it had been dissolved, and the scales looked like they had rotted away. It only had it on it's face and its side. The other fish is still on the bottom of the water, acting like the other fish.
Does anyone know what this is? Please help, thank you .

 

[waterdrop]

Hi Brianne, your friends may not have had access to the kind of "Nitrogen Cycle" information that we try to give out and teach as a skill here in our freshwater beginners section. You may be able to point them to 3 articles in our Beginners Resource Center: The Nitrogen Cycle, The Fishless Cycle and The Fish-In Cycle. It sounds like they may have received the typical "mis-information" that we see hundreds of times per year here on our forum. The bottled bacteria products don't work but they continue to be sold at the LFSs with virtually every tank purchase.

There are a couple of additional problems: Fish -do- sometimes not make it through the transport process (and you don't know where things went wrong, it could easily have been a problem getting the fish -to- the local store where it was purchased, not the part of the trip where you took it home. And yet another problem, or one that may have happened in the future, is that goldfish are really mostly "pond fish." Indoors, they need 30 US gallons for the first goldfish and 10 US gallons for each additional one (fancy goldfish (3-fin tailed) can get by with 20G for the first fish, otherwise same rule.) So they need huge tanks, completely the opposite of the common lore in society, exemplified by goldfish bowls.

Hope this helps. The members here would be glad to help with further info and suggestions.

~~waterdrop~~