Fish are dieing

[Michelle1980]

I was on vacation for almost a week in the beginning of January. I put one week feeders in all my tanks at work. I ended up coming home a few days early and I’m glade I did. I bought those white pyramid feeders and only one seamed to work.

In my 10 gallon tank I have 6 female guppies and 2 platys. Everyone looked great when I left. When I got back one guppy was dead and one platy. With in the next few days one guppy was floating funny, like its back end weighed a ton. Its still alive but having a hard time getting around. Yesterday one guppy, it sank to the bottom and laid side ways and died and now today there is another guppy doing the same thing as the one that died yesterday. Here are the results from the water test:

Temp is at 78 degrees
Ammonia .25
Nitrites 0
Nitrates 0
PH 7.6

I don’t know what is going on. I did a 25% water change yesterday. Any suggestions on what might be going on or what I should do?

[trashion]

how old is the tank? it sounds to me like it's uncycled if there are no nitrates.

also, forget the feeder blocks, they're useless. fish do fine for a week without food.

[JustOneMore20]

All those feeder blocks do is cloud the water and increase ammonia in the tank. They are especially bad for small tanks.

If you go on vacation again for a week to 2 weeks, just don't feed the fish. That's better than the feeder blocks and most fish can go weeks without food.

Do another small water change and recheck the ammonia after a few hours.

How long has the tank been setup? I agree with Julie...having no nitrates looks like the tank is uncycled, but if you checked it right after doing a water change, that would affect the results.

[emc7]

I'm with trashion on the feeder blocks. They're bad. They are food in a slow dissolving substance. You can't control the amount of food, the size of the food or the rate of dispensing. And if you aren't around to change water, you shouldn't be adding to waste in the tank, especially by an unknown amount in a dissolving solid that may affect your pH. Change water. Most likely the damage has already been done, and all you can do is keep the water clean and hope for the best. For the funny-swimming one, it could be worth trying the "pea-cure". Microwave some frozen peas, take off the skin and cut up little and feed to your fish. This is often helpful for fish that are having trouble passing something they ate.