- Thread starter
- #1
Lblair
New Member
- Messages
- 39
- Reaction score
- 39
- Points
- 53
I have a 35 gallon tank that I recently had to tear down and move to a new house at the beginning of May. It’s occupants are a pair of German blue rams, 2 small angelfish, 4 peppered cories, a female betta, 1 small rubber lip pleco, and 2 dwarf gouramis. It had previously been established for about 4 months and everything had been going fine. When the day came to move them, I put the fish in a 5 gallon bucket with water from their tank, a heater, and an air stone. I put the filter media in another bucket of tank water to hopefully save the cycle. I was anticipating a quick move, but as it turned out everything that could go wrong, did. Basically the fish ended up staying in the bucket for 2 days, but I did large twice daily water changes with Prime. I kept the heater and air stone going.
By the time I was able to set the tank back up, I assumed the filter media had died, so I thoroughly rinsed the sponges and bio rings in dechlorinated water and expected to have to recycle the tank. I put everyone back in their tank and they were so stressed they had lost most of their color. Within an hour or two they were mostly back to normal color and were eating and looking good. I tested the water daily, but never got an ammonia spike and nitrites remained at 0 as well. Nitrates were around 40, so I continued with my partial water changes and daily testing, but the numbers stayed normal.
Two weeks went by uneventfully, everyone was doing great until suddenly one day last week I started seeing a whitish fuzzy haze on my female German blue ram’s head/face. I immediately increased tank temp from 81 up to 85/86 and began treating for ich after doing a huge water change. I also started a course of General Cure the next day. By that night the ram was dead. Then I found my female betta dead up inside one of the decor pieces later that night. 2 days ago one of my peppered cories started having trouble staying on the bottom of the tank. I found him at the surface wedged between a plant and the glass. Then he went back down to the bottom and was doing fine until this morning when I found him at the surface again. He’s definitely trying to die, as he’s upside down at the surface. I separated him into a breeder box on the side of the tank so he wouldn’t get picked on. I don’t expect him to make it through the night.
As if all that isn’t bad enough, I started seeing my little rubber lip pleco making more appearances the past couple days. He’s usually chilling under his driftwood all day and as soon as I turn the lights off at night he comes out and cleans all the algae. This morning I noticed he’s covered in white granule type specks and he didn’t clean the front glass like usual. What is going on?! I don’t know what else to do.
