[GSAS-Member] Hello & help!

["A JACOBSON" <amjacobson52@msn.com>]

I am a newbie, & started getting emails from this list the day after the 
September meeting -- darn!  I'm looking forward to the October meeting with 
bated breath, though.

Though I am a newbie, I've already acquired 6 tanks, & have 3 really set up, 
& 1 functioning as a quarantine tank.  Nobody warned me this hobby was 
addictive.

But I need help over something that has me completely puzzled.  All my tanks 
are planted, & my first one, a 39 gallon, is mature, with no ammonia or 
nitrite showing up at all.  I'm doing a 15% water change each week, which is 
keeping the nitrates really low.  It is heavily planted, and I'm delivering 
CO2 with a homemade system that seems to be working well -- when I did a 
hardness & ph test, it showed CO2 in the optimal range.  It is slightly 
acidic, about 6.8.  I'm running a AquaClear 300 filter, but it was used and 
doesn't seem to be quite as efficient as another of the same model that I 
have on a smaller tank, but it's close.  Everything I can test is spot on.  
There is a little too much algae, so I'm trying to work on that with 
learning appropriate feeding levels & getting algae eaters in there.

So here's the problem.  My fish are dying.  They seem to go in groups, one 
breed at a time.  At first it was either ich or velvet (I don't really know 
the difference, haven't seen them in person), which I treated with Maracyn 
on the advice of the Fish Store.  I lost my 4 gold rams & 2 blue german 
rams, my silver hatchets, & my 3 younger Serpae tetras (my 4 adults are 
still fine).  That was during the ich/velvet outbreak, which taught me the 
wisdom of quarantine tanks, and my 20 gallon is quarantining 2 adult angels, 
& a 3 gallon is now quarantining some penguins and chinese algae eaters.

Then I lost my 4 marbled angels (about 1" long each).  Then my 2 siamese 
algae eaters died (which isn't helping the algae situation, but it will 
almost a month before the new ones are out of quarantine).  In the last 24 
hours I've lost my six silver-tipped tetras & my six marbled hatchets.  
Right now I've got 5 bronze corys, 4 adult serpae tetras, a talking catfish, 
a bamboo shrimp, a few rainbow shrimp, & 2 ghost shrimps, plus 2 fiddler 
crabs.  I'm not seeing any other fish in there.

I cannot imagine what is going wrong!  Any advice of what to do next, or 
what to look for next, would be appreciated.

Anita Jacobson

BTW, some fish gave a warning that they were sick (the silver hatchets & the 
angels both started hanging out at the surface instead of swimming around).  
Some fish obviously died from ich/velvet.  But some, like my marble 
hatchets, gave no warning at all.  Swimming around happily one night, every 
single one of them floating the next morning.


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