I am sure that all of us at one point has dealt with a fish or many fish going belly up for some reason or another at some point in their life of tank fish. There are many reasons that this can happen but unlike cats and dogs, they don't whine alot or meow different to let you know something is wrong.
I would like to start a thread about how to handle emergency situations. What can one do when presented with an upside down fish? There is no way for the fish to tell us that they are in distress. They may deviate from normal behavior but that doesn't register in the minds of people new to the tank or to the general enthusiast with many fish in the tank.
I've had fish for years and I had my canister filter set perfectly for the tank. 100 gallon filter for a 55 gallon tank. With a 25% bio media from an established it took 2 weeks for the tank to run perfect. So perfect I rarely had to clean the filters on it. Really I pull them out and they look like 2 weeks...rather than 4 months. The problem came from going on vacation for a month. I came home to a tank full of dead fish.
After a while I started a new tank and had it running for a while with no fish just to establish a starter tank. And i got a fish from walmart to test it. A large koi. I was basically making sure that the tank is set up to handle the koi from my parents pond so they didnt have to winterize them. Yes i know they can hibernate fine but I spend alot less in electricity to run a filter and an air pump than they would trying to heat the bottom of the pond so it doesnt freeze in a part of the country where temps stay in the negative F for more than a month.
The suprising thing is...the pond fish are all fine and its the walmart fish that went belly up in the space of about 3 hours. I tried to search for what was wrong right away but there was nothing definitive. According to the searches...all of the fish are belly up or not. I pulled him out and dropped him into a bucket of pond water on hand that had been previously tested and was perfect.
While I did the serches I was testing the water in the tank and letting the solutions sit for a few minutes to fully develop. The ph was good, Nitrates and Nitrites were at zero. The ammonia was at 2-3 parts. Apparently pond fish have a higher constitution. Thats not suprising since they are left outside "in the wild" and have very little interaction in the way of water balancing.
Either way I have a "delicate fish" and no clear way to fix the problem so I decided to use logic and all I knew about fish and how activated carbon cleans.
At this point the bucket of pond water was not working...the fish could not evacuate the the extra ammonia taken in from his gills in the previous tank. So i did a water change...after an hour and the fish was still upside down or on his side depending on how you turned the bucket and I needed to try something else. So i sprinkled Ammocarb right into the bucket. 5 gallons doesnt need much...1/4 cup or less.
And it worked the same reason that when someone is poisioned they pump them full of charcoal at the ER. Everyone tell you to rinse out your charcaol stuff...thats just to was away the minute particles. But this time I needed the minute and microscopic particles so that the fish could breath it into the gills and it would help wash out thier system as well as the microscopic ammonia catchers.
That fish is now back to health and very vigerous in the space of 6 hours.
TL/DR...I found one fish out of many upside down at the bottom of a tank and because I had zero results on the internet to fix it...I figured it out on My own.
Maybe we should have an emergency fish area?
I would like to start a thread about how to handle emergency situations. What can one do when presented with an upside down fish? There is no way for the fish to tell us that they are in distress. They may deviate from normal behavior but that doesn't register in the minds of people new to the tank or to the general enthusiast with many fish in the tank.
I've had fish for years and I had my canister filter set perfectly for the tank. 100 gallon filter for a 55 gallon tank. With a 25% bio media from an established it took 2 weeks for the tank to run perfect. So perfect I rarely had to clean the filters on it. Really I pull them out and they look like 2 weeks...rather than 4 months. The problem came from going on vacation for a month. I came home to a tank full of dead fish.
After a while I started a new tank and had it running for a while with no fish just to establish a starter tank. And i got a fish from walmart to test it. A large koi. I was basically making sure that the tank is set up to handle the koi from my parents pond so they didnt have to winterize them. Yes i know they can hibernate fine but I spend alot less in electricity to run a filter and an air pump than they would trying to heat the bottom of the pond so it doesnt freeze in a part of the country where temps stay in the negative F for more than a month.
The suprising thing is...the pond fish are all fine and its the walmart fish that went belly up in the space of about 3 hours. I tried to search for what was wrong right away but there was nothing definitive. According to the searches...all of the fish are belly up or not. I pulled him out and dropped him into a bucket of pond water on hand that had been previously tested and was perfect.
While I did the serches I was testing the water in the tank and letting the solutions sit for a few minutes to fully develop. The ph was good, Nitrates and Nitrites were at zero. The ammonia was at 2-3 parts. Apparently pond fish have a higher constitution. Thats not suprising since they are left outside "in the wild" and have very little interaction in the way of water balancing.
Either way I have a "delicate fish" and no clear way to fix the problem so I decided to use logic and all I knew about fish and how activated carbon cleans.
At this point the bucket of pond water was not working...the fish could not evacuate the the extra ammonia taken in from his gills in the previous tank. So i did a water change...after an hour and the fish was still upside down or on his side depending on how you turned the bucket and I needed to try something else. So i sprinkled Ammocarb right into the bucket. 5 gallons doesnt need much...1/4 cup or less.
And it worked the same reason that when someone is poisioned they pump them full of charcoal at the ER. Everyone tell you to rinse out your charcaol stuff...thats just to was away the minute particles. But this time I needed the minute and microscopic particles so that the fish could breath it into the gills and it would help wash out thier system as well as the microscopic ammonia catchers.
That fish is now back to health and very vigerous in the space of 6 hours.
TL/DR...I found one fish out of many upside down at the bottom of a tank and because I had zero results on the internet to fix it...I figured it out on My own.
Maybe we should have an emergency fish area?
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