Another reason for keeping inverts

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.

-Daniel

"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

Well adding a new batch of CO2 and stopping the surface adgatation at
the same time caused a CO2 spike. The spike happened at the same time
the lights went out so the plants were no longer using CO2 and no
longer producing oxygen. So basically there were two problems.

One is that the increased CO2 in my soft water (4 dKH) caused an
immediate pH drop.

The second is that no surface adgatation + no plants producing oxygen =
no oxygen.

So basically none of the fish could breathe and the pH has crashed. The
worms all came up to try to get more oxygen and I would guess that it
was the pH that killed the shrimp. The reason only two of my fish were
showing signs is that they are the two that sit still on the bottom of
the tank most of the time so they have the least water flow over their
gills. The other fish still had enough air to breathe - they were far
less active than normal but they weren't dying. The flounder and goby
were having some serious trouble breathing.

To correct the problem I immediately started up the filter again to
stir up the surface and I added an air line to increase the oxygen
content. Within an hour everyone was breathing normal again.

The pH took a little longer to correct - I mixed sodium bicarbinate in
very slowly raising the pH by about 0.2 per hour. But the pH wasn't
really killing anybody - it was just the sudden drop that hurt them.
Keeping the fish at a pH that low would definately stress them but I
wasn't worried about it immediately killing them. Mostly the lack of
oxygen was the dangerous problem.

Everyone is healthy now though.

-Daniel

That's a pretty cool story, aren't gobies brackish water fish? Just
curious as I just read that last night but maybe there are different
varieties. I would like to start having some inverts in my freshwater
tanks after I get my tanks better planted. You don't have to try and
convince me inverts are great to have (I am still a little wary about
keeping certain types that might eat my plants though) as I already
knew that. Are those golden clams you mentioned in a previous post
freshwater? Cool. Later!

Most gobies are indeed brackish water fish Awaous Strigatus (also
Awaous Flavus) is a freshwater fish though. Common names include Candy
Stripe Goby, Belum Striped Goby, and Candy Cane Goby. These gobies live
almost their entire lives in fresh water - they spawn in the river and
the eggs get washed out into the ocean where they grow and swim back up
river to live their entire adult lives in completely fresh water. Very
cool fish, and very hard to find - they popped up in my LFS as a
suprise one week.

Don't keep crabs, crayfish, lobsters or any snail that you have to pay
money for and your plants should be fine. Any snail that comes into
your tank as a passenger on a plant will not destroy your plants.

As far as the golden clams go, yes they are freshwater. I would not
suggest them until you have kept inverts for a while though. 30ppm of
nitrate might be low for your fish but it's a death toll for clams.
Stock up heavily on plants first and when you're confident that your
tank has consistenly low nitrate levels (like less than 10ppm) then go
for the clams.

-Daniel

Which raises the question: What's the life expectancy of a fish in a
tank with a DIY CO2 setup?

Nikki

Um...the same as a fish in a tank without a DIY CO2 system. Or actually
perhaps a bit longer, since the only reason for injecting CO2 is
because the tank has a large number of plants which invariably improve
water quality.

DIY CO2 doesn't hurt fish as long as you don't do anything stupid. I
was careless - I should have waited until morning to mix a new batch so
I could monitor the change throughout the day.

-Daniel

dfreas wrote:

Don't keep crabs, crayfish, lobsters or any snail that you have to pay
money for and your plants should be fine. Any snail that comes into
your tank as a passenger on a plant will not destroy your plants.

I never thought about it, but my plants have always been fine during
hitchhiking snail population explosions. I control snails with loaches
because they reproduce so fast. Do you know what the little brown
football-shaped ones actually eat? I have a few in my guppy tank and no
snail eaters. Maybe I'll leave them alone and see what happens. I've
got another interesting hitchhiker that's grey and turban shaped in
another tank that my loach hasn't gotten to yet.

--
__ Elaine T __
__' http://eethomp.com/fish.html '__
rec.aquaria.* FAQ http://faq.thekrib.com

Sounds like two varieties of pond snail. They eat algae for the most
part. They will also eat the dead parts of plants if you leave them in
the tank but they'll never touch a living plant. If you have a thin
layer of algae on the inside of your glass (as I do in my catfish tank)
then you will actually get to see teeth mark trails where they ate
through it as they walked. Of course they don't really have teeth...but
that's the easiest way to describe it.

They're fun little guys and they add a bit of interest to the tank
without really adding much of a bioload.

-Daniel

"dfreas" wrote in message
ups.com...

Don't keep crabs, crayfish, lobsters or any snail that you have to pay
money for and your plants should be fine. Any snail that comes into
your tank as a passenger on a plant will not destroy your plants.


I think you have that backwards. I have an apple snail, and he never eats my
plant. (singular until yesterday.) I bought him after reading about them -
they prefer dead and decaying material. Unless they're starving they don't
eat live plants. I paid .99 for him.

Those little things that come disguised as eggs on store bought plants will
eat everything in sight.

A