lovelyxmomy

My husband and I just got a 55 gallon tank and we decided to go with saltwater. We've had it for about 7 weeks now and for some reason some of the fishes that we bought which were more of the expensive ones died first. We used to have a bicolor angelfish (died this week), longfin bannerfish (died 3 weeks ago), pacific blue tang (died this morning) and one of those boxfish (died 5 weeks ago). We've had a test kit to check on the water chemistry and in the beginning the pH was a little low, the ammonia, nitrite and nitrate was fine, but recently the ph has been still low, the ammonia, nitrite and nitrate have been really high. We already bought those solutions to rise the ph and the eleminate the ammonia, nitrite and nitrate and my husbands been doing a partial water change and also changed the filter and nothing seems to work. I would keep on doing the test, but no improvement. Not sure what else it could be. Could someone please tell me what could be wrong? Does someone think it could be that we didn't have any live rocks at the time because we just got some live rocks this morning. So now the only fish that we have are the blue damselfish, blue green chromis, 2 of the ocellaris clownfish, the sandsifting starfish, 4 large snails, 9 tiny snails and 1 hermet crab. I also noticed that our tank has those red marks on them is that normal? Please tell me what we are doing wrong and what we need to fix them. Thanks a lot!

atmmachine816

You need to cycle your tank, don't add any thing else to your tank. http://www.fishlore.com/ read here for info and check out some books about saltwater. What test kit are you using? How much live rock did you add? What type is it, did it smell when you bought it? What are your levles? Do you have any substrate on the bottom or is the tank barebottom?

agsansoo

Also what type of filtration are you using ? Ammonia, nitrite should be 0 (zero). Please post the actual numbers of your test results.