Digitalfiend
Member
I just had the weirdest thing happen in my 60-p. Around noon today my wife and I noticed all of our ember tetras swimming at the surface while the RCS seemed to be making their way up the branch wood to the moss at the surface too. At first I thought CO2, but the drop checker was deep green (it has fresh solution in it too). So I did a 50% water change, turned up the surface skimmer a bit, and the fish went back to swimming normally.
Fast forward to tonight and I come into the living room to find all the fish gasping again, all 150+ RCS practically trying to crawl out, and a few dead RCS on the bottom. So I fly into emergency mode and figure it has to be something with the filter. Upon opening the filter I could immediately see that the filter floss was completely clogged, which is surprising since I cleaned it about a month ago and the water was moving pretty good in the tank. Did another 50% water change and dropped the water temp from 24.5c to 22.5c hoping to get more O2 into the tank; raised the lily pipe up too and threw the lights on moonlight to maybe kick the plants back into producing O2. Checked my water parameters before the water change and everything looked good: 0/0/10.
Thankfully, none of my fish died, only lost about 5 RCS (out of 150+ lol); I really thought my 3 year old Ottos would be done for but nope, they are back to cleaning the glass.
The thing I don't get though is how clogged filter floss could cause such a drastic lack of O2 in the water? Maybe all the decomposing detritus/gunk in the filter water/pad and when the lights went out and plants switched to consuming O2 it was just too much for the tank? The odd thing is that it all happened in the span of one day - the fish have been seemingly quite happy until today.
So does it sound plausible that clogged filter floss could cause this, even if the filter was still flowing just fine? Any other ideas?
Fast forward to tonight and I come into the living room to find all the fish gasping again, all 150+ RCS practically trying to crawl out, and a few dead RCS on the bottom. So I fly into emergency mode and figure it has to be something with the filter. Upon opening the filter I could immediately see that the filter floss was completely clogged, which is surprising since I cleaned it about a month ago and the water was moving pretty good in the tank. Did another 50% water change and dropped the water temp from 24.5c to 22.5c hoping to get more O2 into the tank; raised the lily pipe up too and threw the lights on moonlight to maybe kick the plants back into producing O2. Checked my water parameters before the water change and everything looked good: 0/0/10.
Thankfully, none of my fish died, only lost about 5 RCS (out of 150+ lol); I really thought my 3 year old Ottos would be done for but nope, they are back to cleaning the glass.
The thing I don't get though is how clogged filter floss could cause such a drastic lack of O2 in the water? Maybe all the decomposing detritus/gunk in the filter water/pad and when the lights went out and plants switched to consuming O2 it was just too much for the tank? The odd thing is that it all happened in the span of one day - the fish have been seemingly quite happy until today.
So does it sound plausible that clogged filter floss could cause this, even if the filter was still flowing just fine? Any other ideas?