Trouble shooting help needed

little_fish

Moderator
So i went out thursday and got two damsels for my tank. It had cycled and i did a water change a few hours before i got them. And by 6:00 this morning both were dead. They saw around thursday night, didnt see them all day friday so friday night i went fishing for them and found them pretty much dead. And by this morning the were both gone.

My levels are as follows:
NH3 - between .5 and .25 ppm
NO2- 0 ppm
NO3 - 5 ppm
pH - 8.4
SG - 1.026 (i know its a little high, im working on bringing it down to 1.025)

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Also my tank is a little cloudy and has been for a few days. Not sure why, but i wasnt originally worried about it. It does appear to be getting clearer.

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I plan on going to the LFS tomorrow to double check my levels and SG. I just have a cheap hydrometer that i plan to upgrade soon.
I also checked for stray voltage and that was zero . . . i think. I plan on getting a grounding wire anyways

Here are my thoughts about what might have happened and i would appreciate some other ideas or comments.
1. They were kept at a very low SG at the LFS and they didnt survive the acclimation. I acclimated them by floating the bag in the tank, and then every 15 minutes adding a cup of water to the water they came in for an hr. (I plan on doing drip acclimations after this)
2. I didnt age my water change long enough. I mixed up in my bucket and let it run with a power head in it for 24 hrs and then changed it out.
3. has something to do with my cloudy water.

Thoughts?
 
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Kinda weird. I don't see anything from the tests that jumps out. Everything looks normal. I think the powerhead being so low could be making your water cloudy..It's blowing the sand around. (IMO). But cloudy water won't kill fish because of sand blowing around.

Damsels are pretty hardy fish, but it's possible that the acclimation didn't go well. If you ran the new water with a powerhead that should of been sufficient. did you get the temp of the new water the same as the display tank? Unless you had a really bad mis-reading on the salinity level I can't really see anything that sticks out to me..

Alot of people on this forum keep their salinity at 1.026. So I wouldn't worry about lowering it. Nice thing about keeping it at 1.026 is that if you have a mishap the salinity has to drop alot before it gets dangerous for the fish.
 
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thats a bummer most pet stores run 1.025.how long has the tank been set up.i would also suggest moving the power heads up have one sweeping down towards the rocks and one sweeping up towards the surface for a better gas exchange.looks like it could be 02 starvation.are those lava rocks hard to see but a lot of lava rocks contain heavy metals.check the tank for unwanted additions
 
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You cant see it from the pic but there is a power head in the upper left corner moving the water so there is gas exchange. Ill try moving that other powerhead up, but its not very powerful and i dont think it causing the sand to fly around.

The rocks also arent lava rocks, and i cycled it starting from dry rock and sand so i dont know how any unwanted critters could be in there.

Anyways, im going to have the LFS check my results.
 
Take your hydrometer to the store with you and have them check it with their refractometer.
I've seen a lot of fish die because of a faulty hydrometer.
 
sorry again about the fish.as far as unwanted additions i meant house hold items.being as my tanks have always been around children.i have found hot wheels legos hair brushes..if you turn your head for just a minute.dont get discouraged you will find out whats wrong.a friend had a crash because one of those auto spray air fresheners was landing on a open top tank and covering the water restricting gas exchange.what does the surface water look like when viewed from the front up towards the light look like clean or greasy
 
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The water looks clean, there are a few bugs floating but i fished them out. I dont think one of them could cause that.

Also you can dry cycle your tank, many people do it so they dont have to deal with pests like bristleworms (if you are going to keep sea horses). I dry cycled some of my rocks and sand over the summer, it takes longer but it still cycled. I also made sure it cycled again when i moved back.
 
Also I don't think it's the acclimation process. I do the same thing as you and never lost a fish to it. The SG at my LFS is at 1.018 and my tank is at 1.026.
 
temp is 78 deg, and im not sure what brand it is.

But i went to LFS store yesterday and they got all the same results as i did. My hydrometer is also reading the same as their refractometer. I talked over what happened with them and they too didnt have any idea about what is going on. So i got a couple more, acclimated them and dropped them in the tank.

and they are ALIVE! and well this morning! The first two i could tell something was wrong by this time the next morning, so im hopefully that these lil dudes are going to be just fine!
 
I notice that the ammonia spiked. To me that indicates that there wasnt enough bacteria to convert the NH3 to NO2 then NO3.

How exactly did you cycle the tank? Did you just let the water sit in the tank or did you either add some raw table shrimp or frozen fish food while you cycled? Dry base rock has little organic material to fully cycle a tank.

I would also guess that the cloudyness was due to a bacteria bloom from the sudden increase of ammonia to consume.
 
I dumped a some tuna in the tank because i didnt want to go get shrimp, and then over the next two weeks i saw the NH3 rise and fall, then the NO2, and then when both of those were zero i did a water change to lower the NO3.

I also agree that the cloudyness was due to a bacterial bloom however the tank got cloudy several days before i added the new fish. I assumed that it was from sand being blown into the water column because i was messing around with the rocks. The tank got cloudy about the first day NO2 and NH3 were zero.

Im also not surprised that were was tiny NH3 spike considering the tank didnt have anything living in it prior and then died and sat in there for a few hours before i fished them out in the morning. I thought it was common to see a small spike when adding new livestock because the bacteria load has to increase, however i dont think my spike was large enough to kill them. Perhaps the stress of moving, the trace amounts of ammonia and bad luck was enough to kill them.

The fish that i put in there yesterday are doing fine, and water params are perfect so i think was happened to the first two was a fluke.
 
Might've just been one of those things where you'll never know what caused the deaths. I've had those. Glad the new guys are doing well :)
 
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