Fish Rapid Breathing

[Jeff1192]

So I did my usual 50% water change last night. I also moved a couple of plants around (nothing unusual). Everything seemed fine. This morning I come downstairs and almost everyone is at the surface rapid-breathing. The only ones that don't seem effected are the cories.

My tank is a 90 gallon, heavily planted tank. I normally have CO2 running but ran out of CO2 on the weekend (gotta get that re-filled today). The CO2 levels are really low (drop checker is blue), the temperature is fine, I treated the water before and after re-filling the tank last night with Prime.

For now I have flipped on the air-stone and I'm doing another water change.

My only guess at this point is some sort of contaminant got into the tank. So far I'm pretty sure everyone is accounted for. Any ideas?

Jeff

[Jeff1192]

Just to update this. I finished a 70% water change and the fish have settled down for now. But still a mystery as to what is going on.

[dan2x38]

My son was headed to bed same night as your issue and mine were doing the same thing - he spotted it. I'd just done a 50% WC earlier. I checked one canister filter (run 2 Fluval 404s plus an AC50 for splash) had slow output and there was a NH3 spike 0.50? I cleaned the filter in tank water drained 4 gals. from this 65g African tank setup. In the replacment 4 gals threw in 10 mils of Prime. The water was several degrees cooler too. I added the water keeping the level lower for more splash. They were OK in a short time.

Lying in bed I racked my brain - it had to be more than just the slow filter output? It dawned on me I think I'd forgot to add water conditioner! I was lucky plus my son is very observant! He misses nothing in my tanks - wish he was that way about cleaning up... LOL

Are your guys OK now Jeff?

[Jeff1192]

Haha.....good thing the little ones are observant. It definitely wasn't forgetting water conditioner for me. Errol had a theory about a drop in oxygen levels because I had run out of CO2 a couple of days earlier so the plants would have slowed down photosynthesis therefore creating less oxygen. Further my tank is fairly heavily stocked and if the new water had low oxygen levels it could have caused a problem. Anyways I left my airstone on until I could get my CO2 tank refilled (what a pain in the butt during the holidays to get done....Pyromateck in Gatineau finally opened on Wednesday (Davidson's was still closed)) plus I did a huge (70%) water change that morning and everyone was fine almost instantly.

On another site (planted tank forum) someone asked if I had uprooted a fert tab when I moved the plants around (which I did). But he didn't explain why that might have caused a problem. I've uprooted them by accident before without any problems....so who knows.

Luckily I didn't suffer any loses. I was worried about my fancy plecos and farlowella but they're all fine.

Jeff