The Ultimate Fish Dummy Needs Major Help

[Starling2003]

About a month ago I got a 10g tank with filter and 2 goldfish. I used tap water and used a product to get rid of the chlorine. However, some weeks later, one of my fish died. I got 2 more. One lasted a week and died. So I have 2 left.

Now, reading up online, I see there is a lot more to having fish than I ever thought. I never cycled my tank and no one ever told me I had to. Now, I have too much nitrites, water is too hard, and too much alkalinity.

So now I have 2 fish and a tank that is killing them. What do I do at this point? How do I go about cycling the water and what do I need to add to the water besides what gets rid of the chlorine?

[jeffm1000]

It will be helpful for you to list you water parameters. If you can, get a master test kit $30. We need to know your amonia, nitrite, nitrate etc.

[Zoe]

First of all, I commend you for looking for help getting started on the right food with your fishies. Everyone has to start somewhere and no one can know anything without learning it.

Now, reading up online, I see there is a lot more to having fish than I ever thought. I never cycled my tank and no one ever told me I had to. Now, I have too much nitrites, water is too hard, and too much alkalinity.
So now I have 2 fish and a tank that is killing them. What do I do at this point? How do I go about cycling the water and what do I need to add to the water besides what gets rid of the chlorine?

First of all, your gold fish need to be removed. They do not belong in a 10gallon tank. You will require a much much much larger tank if you want to keep goldfish (look them up on google for details). Bring them back to your LFS.

I believe you posted a similar thread to this one a few days ago. I replied about the cycling, ammonia, nitrites, etc. I don't know whether you read it, but it answers the questions you posted here, so I'm going to copy and paste:

The white spot and loss of fins sounds like it could be finrot. This required medication. However, it doesn't really explain why all your fish died.
I am assuming that you didn't properly cycle the tank. Read up on the Nitrogen cycle, but basically, if you don't cycle a tank, and you just put fish in, they will produce waste, or ammonia, which is toxic. This will kill / hurt your fish. In the wild, and in established aquariums, there are bacteria that break down the ammonia into nitrates, which is broken down into nitrite, which won't hurt your fish. You need to get that bacteria into your tank, either by adding gravel from another tank (which has the bacteria in it), using a cycling product like bio-spira which is live bacteria, or throwing a piece of shrimp in the tank and letting it rot (producing ammonia - or, you can put in pure ammonia) which will induce the growth of bacteria. This is called fishless cycling. You can also cycle your tank by putting a couple disposable fish and letting them create the ammonia for the bacteria to develop, but I don't like that idea, as it means that the fish have to go through the ammonia spike which is painful and could kill them.
Depending on your cycling method, it could take 2 days to 4 weeks to cycle your tank.


As for your specific water parameters, out of the tap (hardness etc), you have a couple options. There are products that will change the water parameters. There are specific drops that you put into your water, or, for example, peat moss under your gravel will make your water soft. Dead coral or texas holey rock will make it harder. So, that's an option.

Your other option is to pick fish that will thrive in your water the way it is. You have hard water? Dwarf cichlids come to mind. Look 'em up. In a 10gallon tank you could have a pair of shellies. They are very small cichlids that love hard water, they live in shells and breed easily.



Also, before you buy any fish, look them up and ask questions.

Good luck!

[emc7]

#1) change water. Change enough water to get the ammoina, nitrite and nitrate into the safe level. Yes, use always use dechlor, or better use Prime.

If you don't have test kits and your fish look sick or stressed change water.

If a fish dies, change 80% of the water and add the 4X dose of Prime.

Some fish like salt or a certain pH or hardness. Especially if you have fish in an uncycled tank, adjusing water parameters is less important that getting the poisons out of the water. Get the tank cycled first thing.

Get a 5 gallon bucket at wal-mart to speed up the water changes.

Once the tank is cycled, you can cut down to 20% weekly (more and/or more often if your tank is overstocked or has espcially "dirty" fish like goldfish) and fine tune the water parameters.

Your experience is very common. It can take up to 10 weeks for a new tank to cycle and during that time there will be sudden toxic spikes of ammonia and nitrite levels. People may tell you that changing water will slow your cycle by starving the bacteria, but it will save the lives of your fish and also very high enough ammoinia or nitrite level can kill the bateria also, forcing you to start the cycle all over again. Don't use a product called "cycle" its useless. Either Bio-spira or Stability can up the process but the cycle isnt complete unitl ammonia and nitrite are both back to zero and the nitrates are rising.

By dirty, I mean goldfish produce a lot a waste for the size of the fish. Also they are very fast growing and will eventually make your tank overstocked. Once the cycling process is finished, you can determine an appropiate water change regimen by watching the nitrate levels.