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This topic is a continuation of the discussion which offshooted from the Weird Smelling Fakey Plant topic I started.

I found some "eggs" which I can't identify. I doubt the horrible photos I took will help anyone help me identify them, but I will give it a try. I did the best I could with a Kodak point and shoot digital camera. I'm sorry, it's all I could manage.

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Here is a picture of the whole tank, and a picture of the AquaClear filter and all the nasty hard mineral deposits I deal with in and around the tank. I'm sure I'm not alone in that problem.

Yes, I know the background on my tank is popping off. I need to get better tape, obviously. It's blue foil and very slick and sharp and literally slices through the tape I used to hold it onto the back of the tank because it wants to coil back into a roll so badly.

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Imo these "eggs" are not from any of your current stock.... don't ask what there are though.

I wish I knew what they are. They and the plant are still in my tank "as is" because, one, I couldn't get my husband to babysit our daughter because he came home sick with a stomach virus going around his office. (I cannot do much work on the tank except a basic water change with my daughter around. She's two. She's a pest--I mean that in a loving way, of course. And I don't want her near this plant when I take it out in case the eggs are something really nasty.) And two, I wanted to grant them a reprieve in case someone could positively ID them as cory eggs of some sort.

I wonder if they are HATCHED cory eggs. I suppose that could have happened and the Danios could have eaten the fry before I ever noticed. Or more likely, destroyed eggs--eggs destroyed by the water change I did. I do think they have changed appearance since I first saw them, looking smaller and more conical now. When I first saw them, I could have sworn they looked fuller, lighter, and rounder, and then several hours later when I got my daughter off to bed and had a chance to study them again, that's when they looked darker and conical and smaller. But I can't swear to that because I've been run ragged this week and I'm about to be run ragged again in a couple of hours so I'm happy I can remember my own name.

I do wish I could provide a better photo. I tried and tried--every possible setting on my camera, every possible way of steadying the camera while still getting a useful angle. Urgh! So frustrating.

I have scoured the net trying to find pictures of some kind of eggs--parasite eggs, fish eggs, snail eggs, even fungal spores--anything that could be a match. No luck.

I had not seen anything in the tank that looked like a mature parasite. I did see something that could have been a worm, but then again it could have just been fish poo. Even if it were a worm of some type, I couldn't find any worms that would be of that tiny size and lay eggs large enough to be seen with the naked eye, let alone a delicately scattered mass of them.

I still suspect it was the cories. And this is why. Last Saturday I put down a Hikari algae wafer. Everyone feasted. About two days later I was looking at the Albino cories and was upset to see that some of them had fat lumpy stomachs. (The lumps were dark) Others of their kind did not. I had by that time lost that first Danio, so I was paranoid about internal parasites. But I calmed myself down and decided it was equally possible they just needed to do a good poo. And then sure enough, eventually everybody was skinny again, so I assumed that poops had happened. I had gone through this before with the Danios, some of the females would look enormous, and I thought they would lay eggs, but they'd let out a huge string of poop right before my eyes and shrink down to a more normal size, though still typically female-danio plump.

Okay, I know this topic is just too laughable. I'm either a hopeless novice who is too stupid to recognize a pregnant cory and cory eggs when I see them, or I've got alien pods growing in my tank.

Oh well, thankfully my daughter got my looks and her daddy's brains. Other way around, and it could have been kind of sad.

Well, they're still in there, still look pretty much the same. I forgot to mention I had thoroughly scrubbed each leaf on this stupid plant before I put it in the tank, so I do know they were not in there prior to being planted. I am leaving everything in place because now curiosity has got the better of me and my husband and we're waiting to see what, if anything, comes of these things.

Oh and I did try and scrape one off with my fingernail. The "egg" was very hard and stuck on really well. No luck getting it off of the silk plant leaf that way.

The only thing I can think of is snail eggs. Got any snails in your tank?

No, not that I have seen, and I have been searching through the tank as well as I can for snails any any other oddities. I did run across an article on the web where someone had a situation similar to mine, including having juvenile sterbai, and then having eggs appear in his tank and not having a good explanation on how any of his fish could have produced such eggs. And in his case, they did indeed turn out to be snail eggs. Those, however, were encased in a slimy cyst and were on the glass. Mine are placed much as I have seen the photos of the cory eggs. But the size, shape, and slightly amber color don't match any pictures of cory eggs I've seen. Unfortunately I've never seen any cory eggs in person in my life, so I wouldn't readily know one if it came up and sat on my nose.

My plants are all merely silk. The plant that had been removed was plastic. The decorations are all resin, manufactured, and had all had their tags intact, which leads me to believe they've never been used and returned.

So I am at a loss to know how, if these are indeed snail eggs, they might have been introduced into my aquarium, since the only natural things in my tank are the fish themselves.

The only other organics introduced have been TetraMin flakes, Tetra & Hikari "cookies" for bottom dwellers, and Hikari Algae Wafers, and Freeze-Dried Tubifex worms, which the package promised to be free of parasites and pathogens.

Well, Marc, thanks for trying to help out and for even taking the time to post a speculation. I'm so sorry for introducing such an odd topic here. I hate to have my first impressions to members of this forum be "The Weird Fish Lady with the Alien Pods". It's bad enough I'm already the "ditzy lady who overcleans her tank and never lets it stay cycled." Poor MatsP, it's not like the dear hasn't warned me not just here but on the C*chlids forum about that. I'm genuinely not stupid, just have not yet learned to "calibrate" my actions to the needs of the tank. I also have the dratted undergravel filter that my father stridently insists must be in there, and it fights with my hang-on-the back filter, which means I have to gravel vac like a maniac, picking up debris that the HOB would probably have cleaned up very well with no effort on my part.

Oh well, if you or anyone has ANY idea or even wild speculation on what these small, (1 to 2 mm "tall" conical white to amber translucent hard, adhesive egglike things are, please post. So far, I'm not seeing any developing embryos to give me a clue. At least not that my aging eyes can detect.

hey, these eggs also look like so kind of snail eggs to me aswell. One i thing i would reccomend is to have a sand substrate or fine gravel for the cory's (they prefer this and it also lets the barbels grow nicely). Have a look on ebay or some kind of mail order plants. I have found that you can get a wide slection of plants and also good quality. Good luck

Perhaps not snail eggs (these are usually clear jelly blobs), but tiny baby snails?

gravel vac like a maniac

Gravel-vaccing "too early" is also akin to cleaning the filter before it's cycled.

You'll just have to accept that the filtration system will be a little bit messy before it gets settled and working to full effect.

I agree that the "eggs" are quite possibly baby snails. Not sure how they got there, but there's certainly snails that are pretty resistant to being killed in many different ways, so perhaps they were in the gravel (note: it only takes a SINGLE snail to make more snails, becuase they are hermafrodites, meaning that they are both male and female at the same time, which in turn means that they can produce viable offspring on their own). I wouldn't worry too much about it at present, but eventually you'll probably have to kill some off, or you'll end up with a monster amount of snails.

--
Mats

Corydora paleatus eggs:

C.aeneus eggs look quite similar. I hope this reference helps a bit.
Amanda

Hmm...peculiar little things they are. They never did appear to have moved at all. At any rate, I removed the plant this morning. I figured if I hadn't identified them by now, I wasn't likely to before they morphed into something that would give me grief. Unfortunately seeing them out of the tank hasn't made their identity any more apparent. If anything, they were even harder to see out of the water!

Hopefully my gravel vaccing hasn't caused any cycling issues. I'd been concerned about that, too. So, for quite awhile now I've just been vaccing the areas where the Hikari wafers had disintegrated. And I lightly suction up areas within easy reach to get up uneaten food lying close to the surface but just out of reach of the fish.

That is the crux of my "housecleaning" problem, as I most definitely do NOT have the best gravel for Corydoras. Coupled with the strong pull of the undergravel filter, the food is hard for the cories to get to. It does not stay up on the surface of the gravel where they can get to it before it disappears out of reach, leaving them still hungry & appearing frustrated. And of course it goes just low enough to rot.

My system is totally unsuited to a cory tank. That much I have figured out from reading the Shane's World articles and reading the posts of how other people keep their cories, and watching mine struggle. It's sort of okay for the mid and upper dwellers, but just not right for the Cories.

Unfortunately, it's cories that I've become fascinated in almost to the point of not paying any heed to any other kinds of fish that used to interest me. They're defintely the fish I want to build my tank around. Too bad I didn't know that BEFORE I got the tank.

Even more unfortunately, I can have only this one aquarium. So I'm left with the problem of how in the world to change the environment in it to be more cory-friendly without completely undoing what progress I've already made.

For example, if I were to change the substrate, how do you go about that in a populated tank? If I were to somehow face down the wrath and scorn of my dad and decide that with the change in substrate, I would need to remove the undergravel filter plates, again...how? That would be so much additional disruption to a tank and a population that has already endured quite a lot of newbie fumbling and disruption.

Oh getting back to the original topic quickly...IF those creatures were snails, I guess they could have come via the aquarium water from the dealer's tank. Since I have curious cats & toddler and therefore can't really acclimate new fish via the dripline into a bucket method, I float the bags of the fish in the tank, cut a small hole in the bags and gradually let my tank water into their bags. The fish then swim out eventually or I dump them out after enough mixing has occured within the bags. So there has been water coming from outside. I had totally forgotten about that. Duh...airhead!

Thanks Amanda! Oh, I wish that's what mine looked like. Mine were conical, sort of shaped like Hershey's Kiss candies. At least most of them were. Some were squat and rounded, more like a typical egg but those were in the minority, most were conical and went from whitish to amber, some turning greenish, likely due to algae growth. They did vary in size and color, but not too much in shape.

Found some references that rang a bell, was led to this site: http://w3.gre.ac.uk/schools/nri/earth/o ... uction.htm

Ostracods...not familiar with them. Anybody here think this is a possibility?

Rotting food (and fish's poo & pee) is what causes the toxic material that your friendly bacteria lives off, so you need some of that in the tank to make them thrive - of course, not TOO much of it, because that will kill the fish.

As to "not knowing what you want to keep in the tank", you're by far not the only one that has run into that problem. I've got four different tanks for that very reason - each with slightly different setups to make it a good environment for some fish that can't go in any of the other tanks. [And I've got three more tanks that are waiting to be set up].

However, when I first bought my big tank, I knew I wanted fish that eat from the substrate, so I went specifically for a soft, rounded substrate that will suit these types of fishes.

It is possible to replace the substrate, but I think your original idea of getting rid of the under-gravel filter was actually a good one, considering what I'm going to suggest: Replace the current course gravel with play-sand. It's an EXCELLENT material for all Corys and many other fish too.

The best way to preserve your "good bacteria" from the gravel is to stick some of the gravel in "sacks" made from some stretchy loose material, like the tights that women and bank-robbers use. If you use NEW ones, make sure they are washed before you put them in the tank. That way, the bacteria can reproduce onto the new substrate.

You don't have to do this right now, and it's probably a good idea to PLAN this for some day when you have a few hours to "mess" with the tank.

Play-sand can be had at DIY Stores or Garden centres, or you can buy "aquarium sand" in your local fish-shop - the latter is in some cases better for a small tank, but you get more for the same amount of money if you buy play-sand, as it's sold in 25kg (50lbs) bags rather than 5kg/10lbs bags for the same price in the fish-shop - content in the bag probably comes from exactly the same source anyways...

You'll need to wash the sand THOROUGHLY to avoid clouding the water - this is particularly important when you're adding substrate to the existing tank, and the water WILL cloud when you remove the old substrate from the much in there - you'll just have to ACCEPT this, as there's nothing that can be done about that.

The only other alternative would be to start over again, emptying the tank completely and replacing the substrate.

--
Mats

Thanks MatsP. Originally I had some vague idea of having a small cichlid and then some dither fish and a couple of scavenger cories. That's how cories were thought of when I was a kid--scavengers and my dad kept only one or 2 per tank. I did always love them. Then of course I got my own tank now, found this site and learned whoops...cories are social fish, so I made sure to get several, and I fell in love with them.

I think my first step in my "plan" is to leave my HOB filter alone and let THAT get well populated with beneficial bacteria. Throw in a couple more silk plants as extra surfaces for bacteria to colonize--since the silks are easy to move and work around and "uprooting" them won't hurt anything.

Follow your suggestion about the pantyhose. Or in my case, my LFS sells really inexpensive permeable cloth bags perfect for such a use and easier to work with than hosiery. (I actually don't own any sheer hosiery anymore--makes my legs itch!)

When I pull up the undergravel filter, do you think I should temporarily move my fish into a bucket with an airstone in case any trapped toxic gases are released? I mean, is that concern even a possibility?

Oh and what sedative do you recommend I use on my dad, who will go ballistic when he finds out what I have done to the tank (I'm NOT going to dicuss this with him beforehand, not after the earful and stony glares and suggestions that I'd lost my mind that I got last time when I even casually tried to discuss it with him. I'm just going to do it when I know I'll have a couple week stretch where he won't be visiting).

It IS my tank after all. Maybe I didn't feel that way before, but after all the buckets of water I've hauled, I've earned the blasted right to manage it as I see fit!

And I think in the end, my dad will be happier with the results than with what I have now. He hates the silk plants, hates the colored bits in the gravel, and he hates the bridge/aqueduct in there.

I've been studying all the Shane's World photos and articles and have plans to make little cory clubhouses out of slate (which my father loves) especially since I've seen how much my cories love the one I rigged for them out of fake slate suspended an inch over the gravel by large glass marbles.

When I'm done, I hope to have an environment that is more natural to look at for humans, and more natural for the fish to live in and enjoy.

Well anyway, thanks once again for taking the time to advise and encourage me. I totally appreciate it. And you've helped me to feel less stupid and bumbling about how I started about this in the wrong way. I will definitely be making a donation to this site very soon.

I recommend you follow Matt's advice and do remove your fish during the refurbishing. I would urge you to forego those fake plants and replace them with live ones. Live plants do enhance a more natural evironment biochemically. They really are much better than dirt collecting fakes.
I know it's a matter of taste but the "goldfish bowl" ornaments tend to detract from a more natural appearance acheived with bogwood and chemically neutral rockwork.
With 6 albino Corys there is a real possibility that they are laying eggs. It would not be unusual for their first spawns to be infertile.

hellocatfish wrote:Thanks Amanda! Oh, I wish that's what mine looked like. Mine were conical, sort of shaped like Hershey's Kiss candies. At least most of them were. Some were squat and rounded, more like a typical egg but those were in the minority, most were conical and went from whitish to amber, some turning greenish, likely due to algae growth. They did vary in size and color, but not too much in shape.

You're welcome. I was "at the beginning" a few years back. Ten tanks later..... Real plants make a huge difference in a tank.
Amanda

Seems like corydoras eggs would have hatched by now -or- gone white if infertile. And aren't they deposited in little clutches of twos and threes? If they were fish eggs, they would surely have been discovered and eaten by now.

Hmm..about the "eggs". Well they were very hard and crunchy, and my fish still are young and have small mouths, so maybe that is why they weren't eaten. I think they were likely some non-motile stage of small crustacean or snail. That's the closest guess I can work up based on my search for information. They never did go white, they never did show any developing embryos. They simply got a bit more amber and remained hard to the touch.

The plant should be dried out by now and I can go take a look at them all dried out and see if I can discern more telling detail. Unfortunately I don't yet own a microscope. I'll have to see what I can see with the good old magnifying glass.

In preparation for the big re-do, I bought a small 3 gallon Eclipse Aquarium kit this evening. It will be a bit cramped quarters for so many active little fish, but the kit comes with a bio-wheel filter and I will put some used gravel to seed that tank before I use it. It is also so small that I can easily refresh the water as needed. If I throw their little slate clubhouse in there, they ought to feel right at home. They're a bunch that really seems to take much in stride. I would have gotten a bigger tank but I don't really have the room right now and long-term, I thought this would make an excellent & manageable hospital tank and quarantine tank for any new additions. Maybe even a small fry tank if I ever get any real fish eggs that need a safe place to hatch.

I also bought the bags I was talking about. They are used to hold loose filter media. PetsMart had an even larger selection with bigger sizes than my LFS had and the mesh size was large enough to definitely let bacteria cross through.

I also found they carried a kind of aquarium sand that looks ideal for what I need. However, it warned that the sand could possibly affect my pH levels. I'd done some research today and seen comments from some people who did experience excess alkalinity due to play sand. Some did, some didn't. I'm a bit perplexed so I will do some more reading before I buy the sand.

Also, I'm not sure if the US play sand meets the same safety standards as UK sand. When I was shopping the internet for play sand to see what was available and check pricing, I came across so many warnings that US play sand often contains carcinogens and some even contain asbestos fibers! One would think these would not be allowed on the market, especially not a market that specifically targets children, but they are. I've also noticed that UK people use a lot of found objects in their tanks, too, that US people, well suburban people like myself anyway, would not dare use due to pollution and pesticide contamination. By "found objects" I mean driftwood, wood and gravel from streams, pottery left out in the yard--that sort of thing. I know where I live, it is dangerous to even let my daughter play on a neighbor's lawn. There are always yellow caution signs indicating the lawn was treated with chemicals so you can't walk on the lawn or let pets near it for at least 24 hours. I have had friends whose dogs developed terminal cancers from eating grass or playing in their own untreated yards, due to chemicals washing in from neighbors' treated yards.

Well I know this is not the time or place to get into a discussion of sand or the specifics of aquascaping, and I'm sure the subject has been discussed to death already, so I will go off to research. I was just making an observation because reading some of the Shane's World articles and some of the posts on how people have put found objects in their tanks very much surprised me. I am envious that you can do that. I hate being limited by what is stocked by my LFS's. It must be nice to be able to just pick up something pretty you see in the woods or at the beach and be able to decorate your aquarium with it. I suppose some folks in the US do that, too. I guess it depends on where you live and where you travel.

As for live plants, as someone had told me, PetsMart did have a selection of beautiful plants that were in great shape...except for each and every display tank was infested with many kinds of snails. I don't want to be importing snails or any other hitchhikers into my tank. At this point I don't know how to properly clean a live plant, so I will have to read up on that.

As for my two LFS's where I got most of my other supplies, as I've said elsewhere in another topic, the plants were in horrible condition. Most beyond salvaging by trimming. Some were rotting outright. And yes, they had snails on them, too. Unbelievable. But then, the stock tanks often have dead fish floating in them. I was lucky up until my last batch in getting healthy fish. Things have changed so much since my dad and I enjoyed this hobby together 25 years ago. Far fewer LFS's, for one thing.

Having a small "spare" tank is always a good idea. Best is if you can actually have some fish that you can keep in there so to keep the filter alive while you're not using it as a hospital - but beware that they need to be movable to the main-tank should there be a need to get the hospital up and running.

I don't know about the US standards for play-sand,
but of course, if you look carefully enough at just about anything, you'll find all sorts of things. Asbestos isn't really dangerous unless you're cutting or grinding it, or in some other way making dust from it - it's not a chemical substance that evaporates or dissolves in water for example, in fact one of the problems with it is that it's so hard to dissolve in anything that is just stays in the body.

Seeing as just about anything can be classified as carcinogenic these days, it's probably almost impossible to find anything in nature that is completely free from these substances too.

What do the sites that complain about the substances found in the play-sand say that you should use instead? They are not selling some "cleaned up product" by any chance?

As to the actual sand itself, it may contain "dissolvable" minerals, such as lime-scale (Calcium carbonate). If you live in a hard-water area already, that's not really going to change much.

Now, picking up things in nature: It obviously depends on how and where you do this, but if you think that the UK is much cleaner environmentally than the US, I think you probably haven't got it exactly right - there's about 60 million people living in the size of one of the mid-size states in the US (Oregon is around the same size, 95000 sq. miles). Considering that a third or more of those people live in the southern parts of England, it's quite a lot of people (and cars etc) in a small area. And there's certainly people using chemical pesticides and herbicides to a far greater extent than I'd be happy with.

My pottery comes from the garden-centre, and I do wash it before it goes in the tank.

Snails are commonly found in the tanks of plants, that's a well-known fact. If you search the forum, I think you'll find various ways to rid the plants of the snails (and more importantly the eggs). Looking for snail-egg-lumps is a good start, and try to remove those...

--
Mats

OH man, I have worse problems now to contend with. My cories are dropping like flies and now I highly suspect velvet. I feel so bleeping stupid, because when you had mentioned velvet elsewhere on the forum, I made sure to look up the disease and learn about it. But during the past week or so when I first started losing fish, I could not discern any outward signs and I attributed the losses to stress of transportation, which may still play a part, or from my weaning my tank off of the PH regulator that the LFS that my fishstore uses. I'd been using it because they use it and I hadn't wanted my fish to suffer too extreme a change. At any rate I did the weaning gradually, but still have experienced losses since my last addition of fish. After initially losing new danios, the Danios look robust, even some from the purchase that experienced losses. But now my cories are looking sunken in, gasping, and have yellowish coloration.

All the dead fish I had netted out had a golden hue, actually almost pretty, but I had thought that was from the start of decay. I hadn't seen a dead fish, except on my dinner plate, in ages. So I didn't really know what's uh...normal...for a fish corpse.

I don't have any medicines here, tomorrow evening is the soonest I can get to the store. By then it will be too late.

My recommendation would be to make a large-ish water change (25% or so).

That will help in the sense that you're reducing the stressfull toxins that are probably still present in your tank. It's not going to cure the disease that you heave in the tank, but just like us humans, if there's "less to trouble you", you feel better just for that.

--
Mats

Yeah, been doing that. Small changes throughout the day, after initial water test indicated slight spike in nitrites. Ammonia and other readings were normal, meaning 0 for ammonia and my usual pH and nitrates (always under 10 because I change the water too often.

Nitrites had been normal for a long time, but ammonia had recently spiked up after the one dead fish was there overnight and I'd did an overzealous gravel vac. I think I caused a mini-cycling, so that when No-fin died overnight and released more ammonia...whoops. Still, the cories had been through a higher spike than that when I was trying to first establish the tank. Also, I would have expected the nitrite spike to outright kill one of the sterbai who'd been ailing since he exited the bag, but he looks about the same as he's been looking since the day after I got him. In his case, I know or I believe it was the trip home that knocked him out of the game. We got delayed getting home and he is a very small fellow. Either he was in the bag too long or there was too much difference between his aquarium water and mine and it shocked him...or some combination of both. I did the best I could to equalize the water in the way that's always worked for me before. The only difference this time being I strained him and the other sterbai through a net (gently) and got them into the tank so I wouldn't dump their bag water, which they had pooped in, into my tank. (This was a different variable--first time the fish have pooped in the bag on their way home).

He'd been fine at the store and after being freed into my tank I noticed immediately he seemed to have equilibrium problems and he's been going downhill ever since. I keep thinking he's dead but then he will suddenly hop up to a new location in the tank. And occasionally he swims around quite normally and joins the other Sterbai in shoaling. He looks emaciated. His partner in the bag has been fine. His partner actually looked worse at first, and then perked up and has been a little busybody ever since.

Yesterday morning I woke to one ailing Albino Cory. As the day has progressed the yellow-golden tinge has gotten more noticeable and he's gasping more apparently now. I would have suspected tank mismanagement and blunders entirely if the yellow gold color had not appeared on a still very much alive fish. And that's all the clue I've had so far that I am dealing with an actual pathogen and not a water chemistry issue alone. Since this morning, the Sterbai have fallen quiet despite water changes bringing nitrites down to 0 readings, and one looks emaciated. I don't know how a fish can go from looking robust to anorexic in the course of one day, but this is the same thing that happened to one of the Danios who I euthanized over a week ago. I did not notice respiratory distress in that Danio, but her gills were darkened.

I know the two Sterbai I got originally the same day as the deceased danios might have been in with a dead fish--a pleco of some sort, I think. At first I had not spotted the dead fish--and even now I'm not 100 percent sure that fish was dead. I only got a glimpse of him as the guy was netting out the sterbai. I suppose a normal person would have said "Hold on, wait a minute, is that a dead fish in there, then forget about it."

But I'm really deathly shy and meek (as if you couldn't tell from how scared I am of upsetting my dad by changing the tank around) and I just stood there like a ninny and took my fish without question.

So I deserve this trouble, but the fish sure don't. I'm really feeling horrible right now. Thanks Mats for all the guidance you've given me. Also, I only just now found the discussion where the fellow changed his substrate from gravel to sand. You could easily have told me to go research the forum, but instead you re-answered a question you'd already answered for someone else, and for that, I thank you so much. I do try to find the answers to my questions before I ask on my own behalf, but sometimes with a toddler to take care of, I get too harried and overlook things I should have found for myself.

Anyway, even if I do lose all my catfish, I at least learned what I really want out of this hobby and how I really want my tank to be and what fish I truly fancy. And I have also learned to keep medicines stocked.

Keeping nitrate down is a very good thing - unless you're trying to grow plants, having a near-zero nitrate reading isn't going to cause any problem (the common problem is to get that close to zero in the first place!)

Nitrites, however, are bad (as you know). I suspect you've had something happen to your bacteria culture, perhaps because you cleaned out too much of the good bacteria in teh gravel (UGF's require that you have some muck in there, or the biological part of the filtration doesn't work).

Being in the bag for a long time (several hours - assuming temperature isn't dropping to far) shouldn't be a problem to an otherwise healthy fish. Being emaciated could be an indication of internal parasites, or just "bad stock" (C. sterbai are tank-bred, and I've seen some pretty poor looking ones on more than one occasion, so just simply the supplier selling second grade fish could be the reason for this!)

Being in a tank with a dead fish is not good, but it's not necessarily going to affect other fish - this happens all the time in fish-shops, because they constantl receive new fish, and some of those will just have had too much stress and keel over. Although I would recommend next time you're in that situation, that you either: Check the tank out CAREFULLY before buying, or if you see it after you've got the fish bagged up, that you say something... But that's easy for me to write here, and not so easy when you're standing there in the shop...

I have two small kids myself too, and although my wife is doing most of the looking after them, I'm fully aware how much extra hassle that can be.

Having a few medecines in stock can be a good idea, but at the same time, bear in mind that:
1. You could spend a whole lot of money buying medecines that you don't ever need.
2. All medecines have a shelf-life, so if you stock up on "everything", and you need something in four years time, it may not be good any longer.

The trouble with this is of course that you don't quite know which of the medecines you need beforehand...

--
Mats

My fish are all FINE now, with the exception of the Sterbai who was ailing since I got him home. I finally removed him from the tank this morning and euthanized him. He was no longer interested in feeding and barely responding when his tankmates would nudge him, and half of him was looking very pale by now.

Before I continue, First off, I apologize for any confusion about time frames. My last post was made in the morning, however I had not gone to bed yet so to me it was all one long day. For the rest of you, who didn't have to stay up with a mildly sick but disgruntled toddler and sick fish, and for whom the morning meant a new day, I'm sure my last post was confusing.

Anyhow, before I went off to grab a few hours sleep, I remembered that I had been meaning to remove the carbon cartridge from my AquaClear filter. After reading Lisa's comments on the C*chlid forum about carbon cartridges, I'd not been in the habit of keeping mine in very long. I pop them in for a day or two after a big water change to get rid of any pollutants or precipitates made by my water conditioning agents and then I take the cartridges out, leaving the bio-beads bag and the sponge.

But this time, the carbon cartridge had been in there since uh...I forget but I think since Sunday.

Anyway, with the cartridge out of there, my readings have gone back down to normal for a cycled tank.

This is not the first time I have noticed nitrite levels going down and fully cycled tank readings coming back after removing a carbon cartridge.

I don't really understand any of that. I do understand carbon filters can become saturated with the toxins they remove and spew it back in the tank. But other than that, I don't understand why I would get such dramatic problems so quickly. My dad used to leave carbon in his filters for MONTHS with no problem.

At any rate, I wish you all could have seen how dramatically the fish responded to the removal of the carbon cartridge. The response was almost instant. The sterbai immediately perked up. The ailing albino cory who was turning yellowish stayed that way for a bit, but then I followed up with a 40% water change and after that, boom...he was shoaling and feeding with the rest of the fish. Now, I can't tell which of the albino cories was the sick one.

It's been several hours since the removal of the carbon filter cartridge and the water change and the tank is still jumping. Cories are cleaning and playing and occasionally napping, I even have a pair of Danios who are either spawning or trying to settle a very relentless political argument. I've never seen a chase quite this unabating occur among them before, so I hope they're just spawning. Fights have always been such lazy affairs and break off once one retreats. The danio doing the chasing had an intense color to it. Almost golden, so I thought oh he's laden down with velvet. But I looked close and couldn't discern fuzzing or speckling. Just a color change.

Well, so then I guess they don't have velvet. Or the albino cory would still be yellow and dead by now, I would suppose.

Okay so off I go now to learn more about carbon in tanks.

I forgot to mention...my sterbai that didn't make it. He was really tiny. Very VERY young. I probably shouldn't have bought a fish that young. He hung in there with all his might, though. I hated having to put him down but felt it was necessary once I saw he was not ever going to recover. He went quick and peacefully. Oddly enough he had all his fins and barbels. All my fish look the way they should, generally, until they take ill and then the decline is sudden. Which makes it harder to figure out what they ail from at any given time.

What sedative to use on your dad? I recommend copious amounts of Christian Brothers brandy. As far as changing your substrate: Try adding a little fine sand before your water change. The finer sand will settle to the bottom every time you vacuum it; then you can take one of those cheap slotted spoons you use for dishing up peas to remove some of the gravel. After about 30 water changes the mix of gravel to sand should be about right.

Only problem with that method is that I have an undergravel filter consisting of two separate plates that I am going to pull up. I'll be making a massive mess no matter how I choose to introduce the sand. I may as well scoop and sock the gravel and dump in the sand all at once and be done with it. It will be an interesting look, I'm sure. But I won't be undertaking this until I'm reasonably sure my fish are feeling better and can take being moved to their temporary tank.

LOL--my poor dad. Yeah, I'd better slip him some brandy. He's going to have a FIT when he sees the new setup. At least I think so. Sometimes I think he's going to kill me over something and he's cool with it and very supportive. Other times I do something I consider no big deal, like saying I would someday like to remove the wallpaper the previous owners installed in the foyer of my house, and the man reams me out and calls me fifteen kinds of insane.

But when I remember back on it, and when I consider some of the things he tells me to do with the tank now, I am coming to realize he believes in a lot of dumb things and killed plenty of fish in HIS day. So I don't feel so meek and stupid about my own tank now.

For instance, he was the one who ridiculed me for having so "few" itty bitty fish. He said something to the effect that my pile of "guppies" couldn't cycle a teacup. He was actually going to come over and put a frog into my tank. Seriously, he was going to show up with a frog and just put it in there whether I wanted it or not. So I succumbed to the pressure to stock my tank a bit faster than it ought to have been. But the blame is mine, not my dad's. Ultimately, I make the final call on this tank. And on the occasions I don't, I'm merely abdicating my responsibility, which is totally lame.