"dfreas" wrote in message
oups.com...
Last night I made quite a few changes to my tank. In fact in retrospect
it was an irresponsibly large number of changes. But they were all
changes I've made before without any problems so I didn't think much of
it - still I shouldn't have done them all at once.

My ghost shrimp population had declined a bit over the past few months.
My candystripe goby likes to eat them but is horrible at actually
catching them so he gets maybe one or two a week. So I added two dozen
ghost shrimp. Also my blackworm population was low. I have an elephant
nose fish that likes to eat those - he doesn't eat a lot but it is
enough to require me to replenish the population every month or so. So
I added a tablespoon of black worms.

While I was at the pet store I saw two new plants I wanted to get.
Corkscrew Val was on sale for $0.99 each and they had a new plant I had
not seen before called Golden something or other (I still haven't
looked that one up). So I bought them and added them to the tank.

Then I noticed that my CO2 bottle had stopped producing so I mixed a
new batch of that. This was the biggest mistake. It was about an hour
before lights out when I did this. To make matters worse I decided to
turn off one of my filters on the tank. The tank is completely plant
filtered anyway so I only use the filters for water movement. I have
one filter that moves the water around at the bottom of the tank and
another HOT filter that moves around the top. I removed the HOT. So now
the top of the water was still. I like this look - plus it has the
advantage (well usually its an advantage) of increasing the amount of
disolved CO2.

Dun Dun DUUUN (stay tuned for the rest of the story after a word from
our sponsors...)

This morning I woke up and the tank looked just fine. The fish were
swimming around, the CO2 was bubbling, the new plants were still rooted
and looking good. But wait....why are there two dead shrimp at the
front of the tank? Actually taking a closer look there are four or five
dead shrimp scattered around the tank. Hmmm...maybe I got a bad batch.
Kind of odd that the fish haven't eaten them yet though - dead shrimp
usually get snapped right up by the goby.

And while I was looking for dead shrimp I started to notice that every
single blackworm in the tank had its tail sticking up out of the rocks.
For those of you that don't keep black worms in your tank I'll tell you
that it is normal to see their tails sticking up occasionally. They do
this to get more oxygen. But they never do it when fish are swimming
nearby because the fish will eat them if they poke up out of the rocks.
So usually in a well stocked tank there will only be one or two very
small patches of tails sticking up in the places where there are no
fish at the moment. If they ALL had their tails up then something was
very very wrong. And the fact that none of them were getting eaten by
the fish was another bad sign.

I started searching the tank for every fish I had to make sure they
were all ok. Not an easy thing to do in a well planted tank but I
eventually found them all. Everybody was fine with two exceptions. My
flounder was pumping water across his gills much harder than usual and
my goby was holed up in a corner turned sideways gasping for air. Not
Good. The goby is not a replaceable fish, they hardly ever show up in
an LFS and besides that he's one of my favorite fish in the tank.

Time to check the tank out. Anyone want to guess what I checked first?
pH had floored out, it was below the bottom reaches of my test kit.
After adding some sodium bicarbinate it is still at the very bottom of
the test kit but the fish are starting to recover. I also turned the
HOT back on and added an air pump for a few minutes. Pretty soon the
shrimp started acting normal, the worms pulled back into the rocks a
bit, the fish are acting normal again. Things are stabalizing.

I didn't lose any fish. But without a few dead shrimp and some
blackworms sticking up out of the substrate I wouldn't have realized
something was wrong until my goby died.

Inverts are an early warning system - and a darn good one. I'll always
keep as many of them in my tanks as I possibly can.


For those of us playing at home, why did that happen to your tank? I gather
it was something to do with your homemade CO2...

A