After lurking around for a couple of weeks, I finally decided to register! I love this website and visit multiple times a day to learn more and become better at taking care of my new fish! My husband and I got my son a 26g bow front tank for Christmas. We didn't know much about caring for fish and really did some cramming after we already bought the tank. Not ideal, I know. We added our fish after only letting the tank cycle for 5 days. (19 Dec tank was set up, 24 Dec fish added.) I feel terrible because we are essentially letting the tank cycle with the fish in it. Poor fish. We've lost two cardinal tetra and one platy. Sad, sad sad. We added too many fish, too fast and on bad advice we messed with the
pH too much and that is what we think killed the platy. To add to our beginner-itis, only after 4 days of having the fish in the tank, our molly had four babies! One died, but three are fine and thriving. They get bigger and bigger every day. This leaves us with four adult molly, one platy, two cardinal tetra and 3 molly fry. We do a 10%
water change every other day, and have done one 25% change. Our water is VERY hard and pH is usually at 7.6. We made the mistake of trying to get it to stay at 7.0. It kept rebounding back to it's original pH. I think such drastic changes are what killed the platy. The nitrites are at 0 and the nitrates are less than 20ppm. The local fish store didn't have the
API master kit, so we're using the API 5 in 1 test strips. Not great, but better than nothing! Instead of trying to change the pH, we're just going to make sure that any fish we get in the future, can handle the parameters of our high pH and hard water.
If anyone can give some advice or tips I'd greatly welcome it! I'm so happy to be a part of this wonderful community.
We have been enjoying our fish and are trying to learn more and more everyday so that our fish will be as healthy and happy as possible.
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