I'm on Seattle water, and have been using PAT to treat it.The aquarium is about 76 degrees now, I kept the heater on, and it simply didn't have any work to do for most of the summer (I discovered an unplugged heater in my SE Asian biotope, though). Also, when I add water, I add it slightly warmer, in that it feels neutral to my touch, whereas the aquarium water feels slightly coolish. Since I'm doing only 15% water changes at a time, I assume that the overall temp is probably only raised about a degree each time I change water.
The ich seemed to start with the acquisition of 2 blue german rams, and every small fish died. But now the ich has been treated, no more spots have appeared, and the other fish have continued to die.
Is there possibly some overall treatment that I could use to "disinfect" the tank & not only save the fish still there, but make it more comfortable to add more fish to what is, right now, my largest tank.
Anita Anita
From: Kate Breimayer <kate@munat.com>Reply-To: Greater Seattle Aquarium Society member chat<gsas-member@thekrib.com>To: Greater Seattle Aquarium Society member chat <gsas-member@thekrib.com> Subject: Re: [GSAS-Member] Hello & help! Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 11:18:07 -0700What temperature are they at? Seems like every freshwater person I meet lately has ich. Am assuming the sudden drop in temperature with the onset of autumn is part of the problem, most people questioned admit they unplugged their heaters during the heat of summer and forgot to plug them back in, myself included. Doesn't explain where the ich is coming from, but I think chilling triggers ich and other diseases. Steev?Are you on city water or well water? If well I would have it tested. Kate A JACOBSON wrote: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 JacobsonBTW, 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._______________________________________________ GSAS-Member mailing list GSAS-Member@thekrib.com http://lists.thekrib.com/mailman/listinfo/gsas-member_______________________________________________ GSAS-Member mailing list GSAS-Member@thekrib.com http://lists.thekrib.com/mailman/listinfo/gsas-member
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