Amano New Year Build!

I'd kept the tank at 30'C for 24 hours and the bloom eventually started getting a slight greenwater cast. I then did an at least 80% dechlorinated water change yesterday (Well, I drained the main tank down to the gravel, and am not accounting for the 15-odd litres of the canister) - and the bacterial bloom when it recovered overnight is BIBLICAL. It will be running at ~23'C for a couple of days before I hit it with another hot tub session.

I can't see the rear of the tank at all, and can only barely make out the bottom if looking from the top. It's unreal.





I would love to know what's going on here. The amount of film floating on the water - which to the naked eye looks like agglutinated bacteria or perhaps protein chains - was something to behold. I didn't take a pic but the water is slightly soapy-feeling between the fingers and running an airstone to clear it creates almost foamy bubbles. I reckon it has to be dissolved proteins and may be what the bloom is feeding on.



The plants seem to be doing fine and I'm still getting strong new growth. That CHG solution did an absolute number on the GHA/BBA/w.e and it's clearly dead. My rotala in particular look like little xmas trees with dustings of dirty snow, and with the bleaching I can actually now see the extent of how bad it was (quite bad).

 

Thank you. It still stings but I'm mostly over it, greyer and wiser. It will be a very long time until I add fish again, so I'm spending my tank braintime, such as it is, on preparations for shacking up the whole setup for winter so I can mostly forget about it and pick up the pieces in spring.

 

The bloom seems to have raged itself out and the water is clearing quite fast. The horrible floating film has disappeared overnight as well without running an airstone.



Params are flat zero all round and I'll have to start making plans for feeding everything, including keeping the cycle going robustly. The floating ball of swords is looking a bit pale in particular and I hope it didn't get a knock from the crap I dumped in, and maybe it needs some nitrate - or less light. I'll figure it out.
The Riccardia is glued to the spot and now I wait to see how they do. Ditto the java moss but I'm not too fussed about those.

I have a bag of 3-1-6 terrestrial dry fert which has more than double the phosphate to be ideal but I think I will give it a shot and see how the algae responds. It also contains other welcome micros - except for a tiny amount of copper but I reckon it will be OK for now until I can supplement/replace it with KN03 (which
seems to be ridiculously hard to obtain at reasonable quantities or prices - Clicks wants R52 for 50g - absolutely delulu). Nobody is pickling Eisbein at home anymore it seems - or maybe too many people are making pipe bombs... I weep for my people.



On the bright side, the nitrogen component is likely urea judging by the smell (it's reminiscent of heel balm, except more pungent,) so I might be able to feed the cycle as well without adding ammonia. I'll see!

EDIT: I made a fence using hexagonal acrylic rod from a window blind and two suckers to keep the swords pinned against the front of the tank and not directly under the light as it tends to end up - plus they now only throw a shadow forward and not over any other plants.

 

Discovered this dusty, never-opened jar of sus goldfish food among my dad's stuff. It smells fine though. I think I found how I'm gonna be keeping the cycle going over winter, although I would prefer something that doesn't add physical waste for the filter to deal with.



I hope my bacteria aren't fussy eaters

 

Shame man, what a time. Sorry for all the loss, that's never fun to go through

 

Thank you

I've learned a great deal from this experience, I just wish my fish didn't have to pay the school fees for it.

I sometimes wonder what really drives us to keep pets despite the inevitable heartbreak.

For now my focus is long term and making sure the tank is free of any pathogens and settled WELL and a paradise for any new friends - and when I'm ready. I very nearly bought that bargain 2-footer in the classifieds but the thought of taking care of just a single fish is too much right now. I used to keep the small 12W light I have on during the evenings on its moonlight setting after I turned off the main light - I don't do it any more because the caustics create movement in the tank that catches the corner of my eye unawares. The resulting disappointment is VERY hard to deal with and I have to bite back the tears everytime.

The plan is to add CO2, wrap the tank in aluminised bubble wrap and make a hood with an access panel for it, so overwinter I just have to test the water occasionally, add ferts and top it up without having to actually look at it. The hope is that I'll be presented with an absolute jungle when spring arrives, but we'll see how that pans out.

 

Why the complete mummification over winter? I remember you had a great selection of heaters there to do the job?

The tank will bounce back nicely. Nature always finds a way in the end. You'll get to enjoy all your micro water bugs again at least, it'll be fascinating to see what pops up over time!

 

Oh, I'll be keeping it heated (indeed I have to, it's getting a weekly 48-hour boil at 30'C to get rid of any encysted Costia that may be present), the insulation is to conserve heat especially during the inevitable winter load shedding that will be coming, and to hide the tank from view as a whole.

 

Are you sure it was Costia that wiped out your tank? For a pathogen to move that rapidly is quite a scary thought, I personally haven't heard or seen that before in a freshwater tank?

I mean no disrespect but I like to ponder on these things and I know you're a thinker too so thought I'd share.

I read this piece a while back and found it very interesting. It was speaking about rapid fish death in a new tank that's often blamed on Ammonia poisoning. It mentioned how the lethal levels of Ammonia are much higher than we realized and it's more often the bacterial bloom and stress that kills off large numbers of fish without any visible signs of disease on them.

Here's an extract:

"Another common rapid killer of fish is bacterial diseases, largely columnaris or Aeromonas. These bacteria can rapidly kill fish with no outward symptoms apparent.

"A newly set up aquarium that has only been running for a few days or even a few weeks will have a lot of bacteria in the water column. Add very stressed new fish from the fish store and they often die overnight, overwhelmed by the combination of stress and bacteria""

 

I'm not sure at all and without pathology work to finger the exact cause, Costia is simply the most likely culprit given the clues and symptoms and I have to act accordingly on the assumption that it may be present. I read some horror stories on Koi forums where people lost entire ponds of expensive fish overnight to it - and having experienced possibly the same I absolutely believe them, nor will I ever underestimate the lethality of pathogens. Ammonia, nitrite and nitrate are slow killers, whereas chlorine and chloramine kill rapidly. If I'd done a water change beforehand that would have been my prime and only suspect.

Thankfully Costia has a lifecycle measured in hours and does not survive long without fishy hosts, but the encysted form can be persistent and the parasite as a whole may indefinitely tag along on snails that are in the water. I'm still deciding whether I'm going to nuke all the inverts present - I have a ragtag bunch of tiny ramshorns that show themselves periodically. For now I'll just do the jacuzzi treatment, it's safest and known to work if you do it long and often enough. I have months to get rid of it so I reckon it will be okay (touch wood).

If it's columnaris, there's nothing to be done but avoid the mistakes I made since it's ubiquitous in the aquatic environment. I also can't rule out a toxin of some kind but on the balance of probabilities - hinging on the fact that I brought home visibly poorly fish and never quarantined - it's a pathogen. If you ask nicely I'll tell you a true (and relevant) story about two dogs and a pond, feeder goldfish and a kiddies' inflatable pool - and the drama surrounding that that kicked off my parents' divorce proceedings...

Stress was definitely a factor, including overstocking and an ammonia spike and nighttime hypoxia possibly triggered by a blocked intake and exacerbated by a lot of live plants. I rectified this but the damage may have been done already giving any pathogen a gap. It's possible all the fish may have survived (or never gotten sick at all) if the tank were larger, was cycled better, or had less plants to cause nighttime hypoxia, or if I was one of those folks who run ten billion airstones in their tank, or if I did some basic quarantine. The filter was established having come straight off the toilet but I more than doubled my bioload overnight after only a week and the whole lot was on a knife's edge waiting for something to go wrong - and when it did the result was apocalyptic even though the water was clear and tested zero for ammonia and nitrite while the fish were dying. Nevertheless, I think I can safely rule out some sort of new tank syndrome or rehoming shock because all the fish died, not just the newcomers - and they died in order of species and not by overall vitality level. Indeed, the marginal glolights I introduced outlived all the barbs so it points to a fundamental level of resistance of each particular fish species to whatever it was.

I didn't have any medications or treatments ready whatsoever in case something went wrong - and in the consternation a kind of analysis paralysis took hold where I didn't even want to do water changes in case it stressed the fish more, or try salt. The actions I did take were predicated on the bias that it was columnaris, which meant I turned off the heater whereas turning it up might have helped in the case of Costia. I just didn't know - and still don't - and much of the detail I only learned once the fish were dead and I'm not going to beat myself about that too much. The lack of preparedness however, my laziness at setting up quarantine and overzealous stocking are a different matter, but there's no point in beating myself up about that either unless I don't learn anything from it.

 

Yesterday afternoon I added a highly accurate and scientific amount of 3-1-6 straight to the tank - precisely "one goodly pinch" - and another goodly pinch of haute quisine pour poisson rouge, date de mise 2012 - to see what effect there was. Since it takes a while for organic material to start decomposing - the "culprit" is the 3-1-6 and clearly one should never add it straight to your tank if you have fish - in any amount, scientific or not:



It only occurred to me to take a pic while I was emptying the tubes, but nitrite is zero and nitrate around 15ppm. It suits my purposes for now but I need to see how quickly this clears and do proper measurements with only the addition of one thing at a time.

The water is still somewhat hazy but the drop checker is blue once more, and I'll see whether the bloom returns, or is maintained by the nutrient addition - and what the algae does!

 

I've decided to buy a 25kg bag of KNO3 for R910 (R36/kg or R1.80/50g), at 7g per week it should last me 68 years.

Maybe I can spare a little for the garden.

 

You're not fooling anyone... I know you're making pipe bombs.

What are you using for phosphates and magnesium?

 

I'm not adding any additional magnesium only Lenolax for Phosphate and Trelmix for Micros

 

Readings after exactly 8 hours.

The ammonia dropped by at least half, which means that ammonia is being consumed (and lost to outgassing) at a ballpark rate of anywhere around 15-20mg per hour assuming it isn't being replenished - and it is. I've set my alarm for 11pm to do another test, the plants will have to endure another 8 hours of ADA glare. Sorry boys and girls.

The nitrate dropped by two thirds, which is at least 100mg per hour, or 2.4 grams of nitrate per day (assuming it isn't being replenished - and it is). I'll see what the second test results say.

It's hard to quantify the ammonia consumption because I don't know how much of the goodly pinch of urea still remains to be hydrolysed, and at what rate. It could be much higher if it is still ongoing (and it almost certainly has to be if the test results have anything to say about it). Seeing as one mole of ammonia yields one mole of nitrite, which in turn yields one mole of nitrate, and the test ratios are 1/2 and 1/3 respectively with no nitrite detectable, it stands to reason that ammonia is still being produced, and at an overall rate that exceeds the plants' ability to consume both it and the eventual nitrate. Especially, with ammonia being directly consumed by the plants to some extent and being consumed by other pathways other than the nitrogen cycle, you'd expect the ratio to be reversed.

The lesson here is that urea is perhaps not an ideal way of producing nitrate in a closed system because the numbers I have suggest I'll be stacking ammonia continuously to target a certain nitrate ppm and the test will get greener and greener over time. I would HAVE to add nitrate ions in some form directly to make up for the imbalance, or reduce the number of plants accordingly - and that would be an aspie's way of running a tank I reckon...

Be that as it may, I don't know how healthy the cycle is overall after hitting it with the CHG, plus I added fish food too so these numbers (the nitrate consumption excepted) need a goodly pinch of salt. I'll keep feeding it once everything drops to zero again using accurate doses and get better numbers.

 

Ammonia reading this morning was back up to about 3ppm, and the bloom is slightly worse than it was yesterday. Nitrate unchanged at 5ppm. We had a MASSIVE thunderstorm last night here in the south and the power was out for 5 hours, which likely contributed to the ammonia.

 

My reg'lat0r arrived. I went top shelf and bought a Chiheapy single-stager with solenoid and bubble counter. It does have a handy built-in timer for the solenoid (which, by the way, does NOT shut off when it loses power - it uses some sort of worm drive to operate) with a start and stop time setting. I set it to shut off at 19:00 so will soon see if it works. The unit does not lose its settings when briefly disconnected from the mains, but for how long and whether it can survive eskom stage 7 shens remains to be seen. OK the timer works and the solenoid makes a MOEROFA whine shutting off. Holy



The Chiheapy diffuser still gives off fairly large bubbles in addition to the very tiny ones, but I'm assured that it will improve over the next day or two. For R17 I really can't complain.



Now we shall see if I can get my algae problem under control

 

Tip: fill the bubble counter with glycerine.

I love the detail on those rocks

 

I will for sure - this is only temporary while I set it up for testing. I need to figure out what I'm going to do with the cylinder - there's no way I'm fitting it in the cab with the additional height of the (fragile-looking) bubble counter. I think I will just secure it with a wall strap next to the tank and let cobwebs hide it, and maybe I'll flog it when it's empty and get a 2KG next time.

I also need to do a soap test on those knurled fittings.

Peli rock is amazing, I'm glad I went with them. I need a third, smaller one and then it'll be lucky!