I'm now down to one lonely little neon tetra in my tank. The smallest of the batch of seven is now the only survivor. According to the guy at the pet store the likely culprit is my pH. With no contaminates to speak of in the tank, ammonia/nitrites/nitrates, and it coming on too fast to be neon tetra disease I have no explanation for it so I'm gonna go with him.
The long term solution with a tank my size is to use about 50% reverse osmosis (RO) water for my water changes and 50% tap. That should soften up the water enough to keep everyone happy. Unfortunately RO water is a buck a gallon and I'll need five to ten gallons of it a week, that tab will add up fast. Using peat, the stuff in bogs, is another option to decrease the pH, the down side is it'll look like my fish are swimming in tea. It's probably not the end of the world, but I'd rather not, I think. Heck I may try it just to see what it looks like and if I can live with it. I can buy a lot of peat for the price of an RO unit.
Until I figure out what I'm doing long run I'm using buffering salts to drop the pH. Results so far are good, todays dose took it down to 7.8 from 8..0. Hopefully tomorrows will knock it down to 7.6 and the day after I can have it down in the 7.4 to 7.5 range.
Amazingly enough the catfish, supposedly the most delicate fish I own are flitting about happily rummaging through the sand.
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4 comments:
Dude,
We have one that has died, and he went kamikaze on my butt and jumped out of the tank and fell behind the buffet, we found him the next day on the floor stiff as a board. Oh well.
Which was it? I hope not the swordtail. I forgot to mention this earlier but all your fish, aside from the brown one, are from a group known as livebearers. They can all inter-breed and are notorious for cranking out babies. The good news is that the parents are cannibals, the bad news is they don't always get all the fry.
It was just one of the orange ones not the swordtails. The swordtails are awesome. If they are cannibals, do I need to feed them some krill or other type of protein every once in a while to keep them happy and healthy?
No, flakes will do fine for them, the flakes have a lot of protein in them.
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