PlanetCatfish.com

Yayyy...everybody is back to normal...for now. Whew! I have been researching and researching and still can't really find any reason removing the carbon cartridge had such an immediate effect in reviving my fish. I have found plausible reasons why there would be a gradual effect. But nothing quite explains what my fish went through and so quickly, too. The carbon cartridge had been rinsed according to instructions, by the way. It wasn't shooting out carbon dust into the tank.

My husband joked that maybe the cartridge made the water taste/smell nasty to them. Maybe. I'll never know and the fish aren't saying.

There's just bio beads and the sponge in there now and that's the way I plan to keep it.

Hmm, removing carbon filter should not REALLY make any big difference. Did you have medication in the tank previously? Carbon filters soak up medication (that's why the manufacturers recommend removing carbon filters before medicating - because otherwise the medication will stick to the filter rather than be taken up by the fishes, and of course, that doesn't really do the right thing).

Are you sure that you had nitrite in the tank just before you took the filter out? If you have some bacteria working on nitrite to nitrate, there can be a spike of nitrite as an effect of feeding for example. The nitrite will be processed eventually - the time it takes depends on how many (gazillion) bacteria you have to process it...

Mysterious, unless it's "bad science" (i.e. unrelated).

Big water changes (especially if the water contains something "bad") are definitely a good thing for all fish - there are VERY few fish that don't like fresh water...

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Mats

No, no medications. And now I have my undergravel filter out, and my pH has dropped from 8.0 to 7.4-ish. I can only guess that's because the wastes in the gravel got stirred up, even though I did a full water change with all the fish stored in the temporary tank, which is testing at 7.8 with the same test kit (API brand, drops, not test strips, which I have found to be useless). I don't know. I give up trying to figure out what's up with my tank. I think I'll just go sacrifice some seaweed to the fish gods and call it a day.

As for your dad 's freaking out I have heard that 30 mg of Valium and a beer will buy you the peace and calm to make any major changes to the tank.
Works for me when I have to go through the set up of my home wireless computer network. I can get pretty overwrought and it's cheaper than smashing the equipment.

I once beat on one of my previous computers with the pipe part of my cannister vacuum. I don't often blow up like that, but that computer...oh well.

As for my dad, I'm feeling a bit more confident he'll take the changes well. (If not, too bad--I'm the one who has been hauling ungodly heavy buckets of water the past couple of months, so I'm calling the shots now). He wanted to see a more natural look to this tank and some live plants in there, (completely reasonable) and that's what I'm giving it. It won't be exactly to his preference, nor will it be the authentic biotope display a great many of the forum members here have had success in creating. It's going to be a nice, beginner's attempt at making a naturalistic aquascape with limited resources and limited skill. Nothing more, nothing less.

I do have to wonder though, since all of my fish are tank-bred specimens, how much appreciation they would actually have for a "natural" tank. I mean, being tank bred, how would they know that their ancestors didn't come from a small Greco-Roman underwater city? Or that great grandpa Corydoras didn't spend his days shoaling with neon colored Zebra Danios over a neon orange shell lit from within by an LED?

I hope you understand I was just joking about your father but not myself. I know just enough to be dangerous with my laptop(newbie) and I seriously enter my most tranquil state when I tackle things about it that frustrate me.
Your points are well taken about farmed mutant fish in a "natural" aquarium but much of their native insticts do survive all the man made manipulations and most seem to do best in a planted aquarium where their innate behaviors tend to manifest themselves. No harm having a piece of Atlantis integrated into the scenery.
I have been building glass/silcone raised planter boxes to provide immovable terraces and then thin layers of substrate to barely cover the exposed glass bottoms.
It results in permenant different elevations so that I don't end up with the typical flat subtrate to give me more dimensions to the aquascape and yet I retain some of the ease of maintainance of barebottom tanks and still get to aquascape with live plants.

Oh sure, I know you're joking about my dad. I'm joking about him, too, and slip in disclaimers along with my comments about him so it always remains clear I still think he's a pretty cool dad even if he's picking on me about the tank. He can be a huge pain in the butt about a lot of things, and yes, even a jerk who sometimes stresses me out, but he's also the same man who would come home from work dead tired but always willing to help me with my homework, even for a whole entire evening or stay up all night helping me with a project if necessary. So with the joking, and my exasperated comments, there's always that core of respect I try to maintain, even while I'm poking fun at the quirks he has that make me tear out my hair sometimes.

Okay, enough with the psycho babble...back to tanks---wow, that is a really cool project you have with the raised planter boxes. I was thinking of doing something with layering slate to make a more easily movable "clubhouse" for the fish. Currently, I have taken large sized glass marbles and ringed them around a slight hole in the gravel, and on top of the marbles, I balance their resin "slate" cave ornament. The ailing cories I'd lost spent a lot of time in there as a refuge. Hikari wafers sometimes get jostled down there and Danios and cories go in there to eat. Danios sometimes hang out in there just out of curiosity or to poke a sleeping cory in the butt. The degree to which Danios and cories interact with one another was one of the big surprises to me with this go at fishkeeping. When my dad had cories, he kept only one or 2 to a tank and their behavior was much different. I don't remember his Danios too well. He had them too crowded in with other species. For all that he did know & do well, he also did a lot of things I don't think I'll repeat. Overstocking was definitely one of them.

Of course after a Hikari wafer feast, I have to clean up whatever sank into the gravel to fester. That means having to rebuild the clubhouse every time I clean it out or retrieve something around it. So in its next incarnation after the redo, the supports will be glued on so I can just lift it and put it back.

To "glue" stuff like slate, you should use aquarium silicone (which is pretty much the same as normal silicone, but doesn't contain the stuff to prevent mold and such which would harm fishes), and let it cure (fancy word for "drying glue") for at least 24 hours before it goes into the water.

I'd also try to keep sand/gravel all over the bottom and avoid areas where "muck" can collect (such as between marbles or such). One of the advantages of a finer grain substrate is that the "muck" stays on top of the substrate and is easy to clean up with a gravel vac. Also, food left over from a feast can be eaten a little while later (you'll find that FULL-UP fishes eat quite soon after the fill-up!).

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Mats

Yep, I agree. In the set up type I described above I have at the least some thin layer of substrate over the glass even it that is way too thin to plant in. I use clear plastic party cups as planters where I am wanting a plant over thin substrate or in my bare bottom utilitarian set ups. It is appreciated by all the kinds of catfish I keep. I always use fairly fine semi-smooth grained materials that provide surface area yet cause no damage to delicate barbels of Corys, for example. I avoid substrate that are made of crushed material with jagged surfaces.

In buying a replacement for the silk plant with the weird egg things on it, I learned that these things are just congealed drops of plastic or some similar type of coating that is used on the entire plant leaf.

I guess that coating helps to keep the plant from fraying and fading. At any rate, when you look at them on a new plant that has not been put into the tank, it's more obvious what they are. It was not possible to tell on the one I removed from the tank and dried, because by then the "eggs" were covered with enough REAL organic material such as minute bits of algae, that it lent an organic cast to the little plastic drops.

I saw these drops on other Penn Plax silk plants in the LFS.

BTW, I AM going to get some real plants. Meanwhile the silk plants give my cories and Danios some cover and some security.

For future reference: Snail eggs, of the "pest" species at least, are encased in a gelatinous matrix, and look like this:
http://www.aquariumplants.co.za/images/ ... l-eggs.jpg
(most will never notice them unless the snails lay on the glass).