New loaches dying again? Fish dying everyday

[Icewall42]

Well, it's been a long year since I had any major epidemics in 72g, but now I'm getting seriously worried again. About a month ago, I bought 3 yoyos, 1 red tail shark, and 4 otocincluses and added all but the shark into the 72g. They have all been getting fatter and are active, but two days ago one yoyo stiffened up and looked dead besides the rapid breathing. I moved him into the Q-tank and decided it might be internal, so I used internal parasite meds with praziquel. The next day the loach was swimming around but not eating, and it had some trouble keeping it's balance. Later in the day it suddenly just died.

This morning, a yoyo that was okay yesterday was dead. Straight and stiff with no external markings of disease, as the first one didn't have any external signs either.

I don't know what's going on. I only did about a 40% water change maybe a week ago, and I added de-chlorinators. All the other fish looked okay (couldn't find the third yoyo), but they were all anxious and nervous, and not int heir usual beggy mood this morning (though they still ate when fed).

Now what should I do? Is this a forewarning of what happened a year ago, when all my new loaches died after a month of keeping them, and a month after these deaths the bacteria/velvet struck and killed six older fish?

Am I in for another epidemic?

PS: I can get water chemistry stats later, but if something was bad in the chemistry, I would have thought it'd kill the little ottos first.

[Icewall42]

Won't anybody help me? I'm down two yoyos, the tiger loach, and now the other yoyo and smallest modesta are spazzing out spinning circles and dying.

Yesterday the ammonia was high at about 4 ppm and the nitrate was almost off the chart at 80-160 so I changed out much of the water, about 70%, and retested and everything was fine. I dumped bacterial preventative in the tank, Super Sulfa or something, but this morning another yoyo and the litteslt blue loach are spazzing out and throwing out their spines, kinking up... they will be dead in a matter of a couple hours and I don't have a clue anymore what's going on.

Why is there no documentation on this?

[starsplitter7]

I wish I could help you. Do you know how your Ammonia spiked to 4? I would imagine the Ammonia is what is causing the extreme distress in the fish.

When you had the epidemic last year, was it the same tank? If so, did you empty the tank and sterilize it before you added fish again? I am wondering if whatever terrible bug got you last year, may have been building up over the last year to make a repeat strike.

I wish you the best, and I am so sorry for your loss.

Tanja.

[stabile007]

Well she is currently doing a water change again right now but I can answer some of the questions:
Last years bug we drained the tank took everything out and bleached the entire inside 3 times and then rinsed it all out. We also let it sit and air out for a while. We removed all the plants and replaced them with fake plants (Most of the plants die for whatever reason we just can't get plants to grow in this tank) the entire sand substrate we baked at about 450 degrees and any other ornaments were also baked or bleached depending on what they were.

[Icewall42]

The ammonia may have spiked due to a recent addition of fish, but there's a smaller canister filter and a Magnum 350 on this tank. I since neutralized all the ammonnia to about 0-0.25 ppm but fish that were normal yesterday when I reached this level are dying now.

[Diana]

Test the following with every test you have:

Tap water:
Ammonia
Nitrite
Nitrate
pH.... and repeat the pH test on some water that has sat out for 24 and 48 hours.
GH
KH
TDS
Salinity (Aquarium pharmaceuticals makes a 'pond salt test' that tests low end salt)
Chlorine

Tank:
All the same. (no need to repeat the pH test)

It sounds like some sort of toxin in the water
Something has:
Interfered with the nitrifying bacteria. (no fish disease or parasite would do this)
Killed the fish.

Quiz the family... has any of this happened:
Non-fish stuff landed in the tank?
Perfume, cosmetics, hair spray...(This list could be endless!)
Cleansers, soaps, detergents...
Paint, solvents, glue, adhesives...any sort of construction stuff...
Pesticide, herbicide, fungicide? (Put flea product on the dog, then hands into tank?)
OTHER
Kids tossed in some Jello or their vitamins? (These are not toxic, but maybe kids tried to hide something else in there)
Did anyone have a friend over that might have done this?

Has the water company been doing some work on their pipeline and then flushed the system with double chlorine? Has the water company changed the source of the water? Are there seasonal changes in the water chemistry?

Always quarantine new fish. At this point you do not even know if it is something the new fish brought with them (suggesting disease or parasite, followed by ammonia spike because of dead fish rotting) or if it is something to do with your tank.

Bio Spira is about the only real bacteria that you want to add to your tank. The other cycle bacteria that are offered are not the actual bacteria that really do the work of removing ammonia and nitrite. If conditions killed what bacteria you had are not corrected, the Bio Spira is not likely to make it, either.

Here is what I did in similar conditions:
1) Late in the evening, day 1: Fish piping. Add Amquel Plus and Nov Aqua. These detoxify the nitrogen products and locks up heavy metals. (my test results were ammonia 0, nitrite 0, nitrate 10 ppm, but maybe there was something else going on) add hydrogen peroxide @ 1/4 tsp per 10 gallons. (My fish were piping)
cleaned the filter. (It was still running fine before the cleaning, no major build-up)
2) Next morning: 90% water change (tap water is known to be good) with more Amquel as the dechlor.
3) Next day (day 3) the fish were still piping, and several had died.
Moved all fish out of the tank.
Drained and vacuumed several times, to really get the substrate clean.
Added hydrogen peroxide to the last little bit of water in the substrate in case an anaerobic spot had built up, and let this sit for several days. Then refill and dump several more times. Then add activated carbon, and run the equipment with no fish. I fed the tank with fish food to encourage the bacteria. After a week of this I added some Guppies. Within a few days there were baby guppies, and I have been building up the population slowly.

I still have no idea what was the actual culprit, but I am doing some work in another room, and maybe the fumes got to that one tank. (I do not know why the other 3 tanks in the same room as the tank that went bad were unaffected)

What I would do for your tank at this point:
Keep up the water changes to keep the ammonia under .25 ppm, the nitrite under 1 ppm and the nitrates under 20 ppm (and lower is better).
With every water change vacuum part of the substrate as much as you can. Move rocks and ceramic castles to get under them. Work around any plants the best you can without disturbing the roots.
Monitor the tank with every test you have, but also test the tap water daily, too. If there is anything suspicious there you can prepare the tap water a day ahead by putting it in a garbage can and running a filter with activated carbon in it. (For example an Aquaclear 50 with no other media than the activated carbon)

[starsplitter7]

Sounds like you have done everything you can. That's just terrible the problems you are having.

Recently I had a spike in Ammonia that burned a Dojo, which perished, and I was given the advice of using Prime. The Prime doesn't exactly get rid of the Ammonia but neutralizes it until the bacteria can eat it. I have been using this product for a month and it has helped stabilize my tanks. It seems to be a really stable product, and you use 5 mL per 50 gallons, so it is super economical. I like it, because the effect is immediate, plus it gets rid of Chlorine, Cloramine, helps the slime coat.

I imagine it may help if you are able to take a picture, and keep careful notes to help make sure this never happens to you or anyone else again.

[Icewall42]

No fumes, no kids, toxic products accidentally placed in the tank. Water reports have been stable over the past year with very small trace amounts of fertilizers and cyanide. The tiger loach had been Quarantined, and the yoyos were in the tank for about 3 weeks without problems until now. The other fish that I got with the yoyos are in another tank, unaffected.

Any work on the pipes would have affected the fish soon after changing the water, not 2-3 weeks later.

The tap is neutral, maybe a bit alkaline, and has no ammonia or anything in it.

TDS on the tank was about 500 ppm (due to a long past salt treatment for black pigment spots on the clowns) and will likely have now fall to 200-300 ppm.

The problem though is that there's nothing to take a picture of. They are completely normal looking on the outside besides stiffening and breathing rapidly, and sometimes getting bent spine.

And the tank has no undergravel filter because it is using sand, so the debris usually gets picked up by the filters.

EDIT: This is the same thing that happened to a Sinobotia Pulchra I had some time ago. No cure. The fish stiffens or kinks, spasms, stops breathing, spasms, stops breathing again, all till it is dead which is a matter of hours.

[stabile007]

Hello here is the picture as requested....Also we just added Furan 2 to the tank kinda going for the shotgun approach at seeing what it could be...it was very random.

[fish_frenzy]

Does the tank have a smell? Maybe like rotten eggs? A healthy aquarium should smell like soil. There should be no fishy smell or rotten egg smell.

What sometimes happens if the sand is not being sifted by you or the fish or malaysian trumpet snails, it gets pockets of anaerobic gas.

This gas is extremely toxic and will kill your fish without any signs other than what you are describing. Mine did the spiralling, gasping and darting.

Pockets of this gas build up in the sand and if a fish was routing around for food or an ornament got moved, that's all it takes to bring the bubble of gas to the surface.

I learned this the hard way by losing 3 Discus.

If the fish don't dig in the sand, the you need to do it when doing water changes every week. Just use your hands, a chopstick or skewer etc.

Tammy

[shari2]

Tammy has a good point. Did you ever see bubbles rising from the surface? They'd be fat bubbles, not the tiny ones you sometimes see in planted tanks 'pearling' from the plants.


These types of bubbles are hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide is found in water, saline and freshwater, both in the ionized (HS-) form and the non-ionized form (H2S). The ratio depends on the pH/acidity of the water. The nonionized H2S is poisonous to fish. At pH=9 (basic conditions) there is only 1% in this form, at pH=7 it is 50% and more than 99% at pH lower than 5. Critical conditions arise when the concentration is higher than 0.002 mg/L in freshwater. Sudden and heavy releases of H2S can kill off a whole tank of fish in a short time.

The one problem with this theory in your case is that it seems to be hitting fish one at a time...

[Icewall42]

It's difficult to say. I wish this is all the issue was, but the tank had a soil-like smell to it, nothing rotten or otherwise fishy/bad. The horseface in there does some stirring in the sand, and usually I will stir it when I do a water change.

Also, it seems odd to me that fish are going one at a time, or two at a time.

Lastly, the blue loach pictured is still alive and in pain. He's struggling something fierce. But he is also getting a bit more bloated since that picture. Not horrifically, but it is noticeable.

Internal bacteria, maybe? I originally treated with Furon-2, but should I try something else?

[mistergreen]

Did you mention the age of this tank since the restart? Has any unaccounted fish gone missing ie.. dead in the tank.

And hate to say this but always quarantine fishes before adding them to the main tank. But I don't think disease is the main issue here.

Sounds like the water chemistry in intolerable to the fishes and are causing secondary infections.

[Icewall42]

The last time it was broken down and completely bleached out was about a year ago. I'd had the tank for about a year before that, and I bought it used, so beyond two years, I don't really know.

[chefkeith]

Sorry to hear about this.
Those were some really bad water parameters you had there. You need to figure out what was causing all that ammonia. If those nitrates numbers are correct, then the bacteria is processing ammonia at a high rate.

You might want to think about going bare bottom with no decor for awhile to see if that helps keep the water chemistry steady.