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Water Parameters and a New Tank - A Case History

By Allan James
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It started on a club meeting night for the Greenock & District Aquarist Society when a request was put forward for every member to write an article on setting up a community tank. I felt duty bound as I'm always moaning about more articles for our newsletter. Luck would have it that I was about to set up a tank for my juvenile fish that were out of the fry stage.This I suppose couldn't be classed as a community tank, but my experiences would not be too faraway from that.

The story starts with a 4' 0" x 12" x 12" tank in my fishhouse which I had had trouble with for the past 12 months. I had an assortment of Characins, Anabantids, Corydoras, a Synodontis and my problem fish Hoplosternum littorale. I had grown them on from small and they were about 4 inches in length, but about a year ago they started getting white spots over the body similar to white spot, but it affected the edges of the fins, going white and stringy with the barbels wearing away and mucus coming off of the body. Iit only affected the Hoplo's and no other fish. I treated with neat Acriflavine and it cleared it up for about 2 weeks before returning again. I tried other treatments, but to no avail. So this went on, as I explained earlier, for about a year and I could not put any other fish in the tank for fear of spreading the disease. I thought enough is enough! I needed this tank for my young Corys which were getting crowded in my 18" x 12" x 12" breeding set-ups. I had a spare 10 gall. tank empty in the fishhouse and decided to move all the fish into this tank even though it was a bit on the small side for this purpose.

I moved all the fish to this tank, then emptied all the water out of the 4' tank and disposed of it. I didn't want to leave any bacterial infection to return; hence, I threw out the sand that I had on the bottom, rocks and pipe work. I also washed out the filters in water taken from another tank. I scrubbed the tank down thoroughly with salt and warm water and left it to dry over a few days. I then filled the tank with chlorine free tap water and laid a thin bed of sandpit sand, mixed with well washed bird sand, which has pieces of coral scattered through it so to keep the pH.up towards the neutral ( 7. 0) mark. I find with my local water being so soft (Io dGH) it tends to take a nose-dive down to dangerous levels since it has no buffering qualities; it might be good for breeding certain fish, but it does have its problems. I then added two pots planted with Pygmy Amazon swords, two lengths of small bogwood and a flat stone on top to weigh down the wood plus a plant pot on its side. I deliberately didn't want to put too much in the tank as I wanted to observe the fish and give them enough room to grow on. The filter capacity was a small internal filter and a corner filter; a bit under filtered perhaps, but it would have to do until my finances allowed otherwise.

I had set up the tank on a Saturday so I thought that I would just move the fish on the Sunday as the filters had been running for 24 hrs. I decided on hindsight to check the water first and I'm glad I did. I checked Ammonia(NH3), Nitrite(N02-) and Nitrate(N03-). I thought they wouldn't be too bad as the filters should still have the good bacteria left from the previous set-up. How wrong can you be, the Ammonia was sky-high at 1.5mg per litre of water, the safe level being under 0.25mg per litre. Nitrite was tested at 0.3mg per litre of water but, I realised that it would certainly rise to dangerous levels once the Ammonia levels dropped. The Nitrate level was 12.5mg per litre of water. This again would rise after the Nitrite levels had risen and dropped. I then decided to leave the moving of the fish for the meantime. The bacteria left in the filters was probably not enough to deal with the new water, base medium and decorations, but I had no choice as to keeping the old water and sand as I did not want my problems to reappear. I also added a pinch of flake now and then to help in establishing the colony of bacteria. Below is the table of readings that I carried out over the next 2 weeks.

Table of Ammonia, Nitrite, and Nitrate Readings Taken Over Two Week Period

As you can see, as the Ammonia levels drop the Nitrite levels rise and take quite a while to drop while the Nitrates went steadily up - although in an established tank this can go down with constant water changes.

Over the coming weeks the Nitrite levels should drop significally as the Nitrification cycle starts operating properly. I added the young Corys when the ammonia levels dropped; I also added another corner filter from an established tank to speed up the bacterial process. I suppose I could have added a starter culture purchased from many pet shops for setting up a new tank, but I don't like to add any stuff that is not natural in my tanks, as many of my friends will testify (these products tend sometimes to give your test kits false readings, especially Ammonia). The one lesson learned is to certainly keep and use your test kits if you are in any doubt about your water quality and only add a small amount of fish during the Nitrification cycle (four to six weeks).The Hoplos that I moved stayed clear of infection for about two weeks, then the disease appeared again. I'm beginning to think that this is a problem associated with litorale alone and I shall investigate further in the future about this.

This might be a bit of a long winded story when I was only asked to write about setting up a community tank, but this is a case history of an actual event, so I would think invaluable when setting up any tank.