thought reticulated cory ok

[mattbeau]

not sure if this should go in emergencies as it may be nothing

ok, I had filter problems earlier this week and my water stats went over the top, they arent fantastic right now.

Nitrite 0.25
ammonia 0.25
Nitrate 20

before water change

everyone else is ok, my reticulated is the only of his kind, I thought he would do fine with my peppered, but he just doesnt seem interested in going anywhere except in the right corner of the tank.

He's breathing hard and goes up for air from time to time, none of the other fish does this except the honeydwarf gauramis. I dont think he is eating.

The Female honey dwarf occassionally goes to him ant taps on his back, (awww), but he doesnt even budge. and occassionally the Female peppered comes to him and sits by him.

I have since swawped air pumps and turned it on full blast, to get more air in there, just in case if he has some type of infection or something, though he shows no visible signs of damadge

before this spout he was constantly hovering over the sand, as if not wanting to settle.

I dont want to medicate the tank, as I'm trying to get my bacteria up and running again correctly and I dont even know if he even has something.. and I dont have a QT tank for him.

 

[Tokis-Phoenix]

Ammonia and nitrites are always most concentrated at the bottom of the tank and corys are very sensitive to these things, i don't think he is sick at all but just feeling the ill effects of there being so many nitrites and ammonia in there which are lethal to any fish.
Stay away from using meds or any nitrite/ammonia destroying chemicals as these will only make life harder for your fish, the best thing you can do to safely lower your harmful stats is to do a 40% water change ASAP as the reason your cory is acting odd is becuase of these- the peppered cory is affected by the stats just as much as the other cory but peppered ones tend to be quite hardy corys in comparison to many other which is why he still may be acting ok.

 

[mattbeau]

ok, another question, If the nitites and ammonia concentrate on near the bottom, should I generally be pulling water from thier, to get the worst case senerio?

I have been generally reading from the surface

 

[Tokis-Phoenix]

It would help if you could, you can buy a thing called a gravel vac/syphon which is a little contraption that helps you clean the substrate at the bottom of the tank, sucking all the grit and waste out of the substrate- these are very useful if you have gravel based tanks as gravel tends to trap more rotting waste which leaks ammonia than sand does.

Corys also prefer sand or fine gravel based tanks because of this and they also find things like sand easier to feed off as well but if you have gravel, as long as you keep it very clean and it isn't sharp or anything but is rounded you should be fine .
Corys should have long/ish whiskers at their mouths called barbels which help them to feed, are your corys barbels all in intact and not missing any or looking eroded? Eroded barbels are common in tanks dealing with water quality issues or not satifactory cleaned substrate so keeping an eye on your corys barbels is important as they can easily get bacterial infections.

 

[mattbeau]

yeah, I vac the surface every week during water change, but I cant get it all in one big swoop as its sand and I havent perfected the technique,

I'm using tahitian black moon sand, which is basically the cause of all my problems lately when it was shutting my filtes down, they are running good now though, up 72 hours constantly.

what I have noticed though, is i moved the airstone perpendicular and have started a bit of a circular current, moving a little debris and circulating it so I've opend the chokes on both of my filters so it can pull from the top and bottom

 

[mattbeau]

Ok upon closer examination one of his barbels is slightly shorter (perhapse.25 cm)

so perhapse he cought it on something. the good news is he's active again