I am usually quite the patient person, but last night i may have just done too much to the tank. Heres the situation:
I have an Eclipse 12 thats been setup for 4 weeks and a day or so, in this tank I have a redfoot moon snail, 4 margarita snails 1 greet serpent star, and a pepermint shrimp (all of those seem just fine)
So 2 days ago, I did my water tests and my Amonia was 0, Nitrites were 0, and Nitrates were 20. So I went down to Petco 8O and bought the most active false perc.
I drip aclimated him and after that was done put him in the tank, for the first day everythign seemd great, though he was hiding, he was eating when offered. Then yesterday I noted that he might be breating just a little hard, so I did the tests again and got the same results.
This morning I woke up at about 5am, and checked on him and found him rather pale, and sort of leaning on a rock breathing frantically. He moved some but eventually kind of stood on his tail near the filter intake where he continued to breath frantically.
I scooped him out with the net, which was real easy, so that tells you what condition he was in. And put him into one of the JBJ nano cube tanks thats only been running for like a little over a week, but was started with cured liverock, livesand and already bacteria laden ceramic rings, and the premixed saltwater you can buy in LFS's.
Okay, so I let him sit in the net in the cube for about a half hour or so, and then released him and hes breathing much calmer now (almost normal looking compared to the way I found him this morning), it's no longer like hes panting and gasping for air.
The things that changed yesterday were:
1. I did away with the existing filtering system on the Eclipse tank, and replaced it with a Penn-Plax Cascade 1000 canister filter, just running carbon and polishing material, no bioballs, or rings or anything like that.
The stock filter only contained one of those cartridges with poly material on top and carbon inside, and a biowheel.
2. I took the biowheel off of the old stock filter and just have it floating in the tank incase there is any beneficial bacteria on it. Im wondering if I should have dunked it a couple times in fresh saltwater first?
3. I moved the liverock around quite a bit, sort of piled it up into one corner of the tank, which seemd to make the water a bit cloudy, and I lightly vacumed the livesand to just suck some of the crud that was on the surface, maybe a total of 1 gallon of water sucked out of the tank.
4. By adding the new canister filter, I had to add aproximately 2 gallons of premixed LFS bought salt water to accomodate the amount of water that the canister holds. The reason for the switch to the canister is because the tank was getting really crowded with powerheads, heater, cords etc and since all the stock filter ran was a carbon filter pad, I saw no harm in replacing it with the canister which also just runs carbon and a polishing pad and allowed enough flow to get rid of the extra powerheads in the tank.
This is a Eclipse 12, with aproximately 15lbs of liverock, and 10lbs of livesand. I did notice however this morning that the water temp was lower than normal, at only about 74f, I had turned it down about a week ago to accomodate the redfoot moon snail to like 76 or 77, but it must not be too accurate, so I've bumped it up slightly now to get it back up to 76 or 77f again.
I just rechecked my water tests, and my amonia is 0, and my nitrates are 20, but my nitrites went up to 0.3 Now upon thinking about it, I did add some AmQuel last night because I had rinsed the new carbon material for the penn-plax cannister in tap water, and our tapwater seems high in chlorine, so I wanted to be sure.
Im wondering if by moving the liverock around, I had set some cycle in motion, and the AmQuel erased the Amonia, but the nitrites went up.
I was also under the impression that creatures like snails, shrimp, and starfish are less hardy than some marine fish and thus would show signs of being in distress first, buy my peppermint shrimp is happily eating away at whatever it is that he finds he likes on the biowheel now floating in the tank.
The starfish however I dont see right now since he found a permanant place in the sand and rocks, but I did see him poking his arms out last night before bed.
I wonder if it was the fish from petco, but I think something else happened in the tank to cause this distress to the clown. I *DIDN'T* add the bag water to my tank, so thats not an issue either.
Hopefully he will survive this ordeal.
I have an Eclipse 12 thats been setup for 4 weeks and a day or so, in this tank I have a redfoot moon snail, 4 margarita snails 1 greet serpent star, and a pepermint shrimp (all of those seem just fine)
So 2 days ago, I did my water tests and my Amonia was 0, Nitrites were 0, and Nitrates were 20. So I went down to Petco 8O and bought the most active false perc.
I drip aclimated him and after that was done put him in the tank, for the first day everythign seemd great, though he was hiding, he was eating when offered. Then yesterday I noted that he might be breating just a little hard, so I did the tests again and got the same results.
This morning I woke up at about 5am, and checked on him and found him rather pale, and sort of leaning on a rock breathing frantically. He moved some but eventually kind of stood on his tail near the filter intake where he continued to breath frantically.
I scooped him out with the net, which was real easy, so that tells you what condition he was in. And put him into one of the JBJ nano cube tanks thats only been running for like a little over a week, but was started with cured liverock, livesand and already bacteria laden ceramic rings, and the premixed saltwater you can buy in LFS's.
Okay, so I let him sit in the net in the cube for about a half hour or so, and then released him and hes breathing much calmer now (almost normal looking compared to the way I found him this morning), it's no longer like hes panting and gasping for air.
The things that changed yesterday were:
1. I did away with the existing filtering system on the Eclipse tank, and replaced it with a Penn-Plax Cascade 1000 canister filter, just running carbon and polishing material, no bioballs, or rings or anything like that.
The stock filter only contained one of those cartridges with poly material on top and carbon inside, and a biowheel.
2. I took the biowheel off of the old stock filter and just have it floating in the tank incase there is any beneficial bacteria on it. Im wondering if I should have dunked it a couple times in fresh saltwater first?
3. I moved the liverock around quite a bit, sort of piled it up into one corner of the tank, which seemd to make the water a bit cloudy, and I lightly vacumed the livesand to just suck some of the crud that was on the surface, maybe a total of 1 gallon of water sucked out of the tank.
4. By adding the new canister filter, I had to add aproximately 2 gallons of premixed LFS bought salt water to accomodate the amount of water that the canister holds. The reason for the switch to the canister is because the tank was getting really crowded with powerheads, heater, cords etc and since all the stock filter ran was a carbon filter pad, I saw no harm in replacing it with the canister which also just runs carbon and a polishing pad and allowed enough flow to get rid of the extra powerheads in the tank.
This is a Eclipse 12, with aproximately 15lbs of liverock, and 10lbs of livesand. I did notice however this morning that the water temp was lower than normal, at only about 74f, I had turned it down about a week ago to accomodate the redfoot moon snail to like 76 or 77, but it must not be too accurate, so I've bumped it up slightly now to get it back up to 76 or 77f again.
I just rechecked my water tests, and my amonia is 0, and my nitrates are 20, but my nitrites went up to 0.3 Now upon thinking about it, I did add some AmQuel last night because I had rinsed the new carbon material for the penn-plax cannister in tap water, and our tapwater seems high in chlorine, so I wanted to be sure.
Im wondering if by moving the liverock around, I had set some cycle in motion, and the AmQuel erased the Amonia, but the nitrites went up.
I was also under the impression that creatures like snails, shrimp, and starfish are less hardy than some marine fish and thus would show signs of being in distress first, buy my peppermint shrimp is happily eating away at whatever it is that he finds he likes on the biowheel now floating in the tank.
The starfish however I dont see right now since he found a permanant place in the sand and rocks, but I did see him poking his arms out last night before bed.
I wonder if it was the fish from petco, but I think something else happened in the tank to cause this distress to the clown. I *DIDN'T* add the bag water to my tank, so thats not an issue either.
Hopefully he will survive this ordeal.
