# 30 gallon with sluggish fish, no idea what is going on



## fuzzysocks (Dec 8, 2010)

My 30 gallon tank with julii cories and angels seems to have something wrong with it. The problem is that "something" is quite difficult to define.

I acquired this 30 gallon (and a couple other tanks) in September when I got recruited into long-term fishsitting duties. Compared to the other tanks, this tank has always seemed a little wonky, but not in any obvious sort of way. Water quality has always been fine--pH of 6.5-7, 0 ammonia, 0 nitrite, 20 ppm nitrate or less. Until recently, the fish have seemed fine. The angels in it were a mated pair, and happily laid (and ate) eggs every other week. The juliis flitted around the way cories always do.

There have been a couple of outbreaks of a nasty brownish algae in the tank, but they were dealt with by changing the water. This has never happened in my other tanks. Also, I have never had ramshorn snails survive for more than 24 hours in this tank. Both of my other tanks have been able to sustain snail populations for over a year.

The inhabitants of the tank have gotten a little more sluggish over the past week or two. I originally chalked it up to the tank being a little chilly (22 C) due to the cold snap, and one of the angels having a fin rot flareup. This weekend (after the tank warmed up) I noticed a brown algae outbreak, and got very concerned that the juliis and angels were all pretty lackluster. The fin rot on the angel had cleared up, but the juliis all had lost their barbells. None of them were eating or swimming much, and the angels haven't laid eggs on their usual schedule.

Trying to rinse the substrate and two 50% water changes simply resulted in the inhabitants acting distressed, so all of them have been moved into a 55 gallon community tank. Despite the tank being crowded, the juliis are now acting normally. The two angels from the 30 are being bullied by the two adult angels already in the 55, but they're finally starting to eat a little bit, and I'm sure they'll deal with the bullying on their own terms.

For all my tanks, healthy and otherwise, I use tap water with Prime in the recommended concentration. The 30 gallon has gravel with some sort of aquarium soil as a substrate. The other tanks have silica sand. There are low-light tolerant plants in all the tanks, and the plants are the one thing in the 30 that don't seem hellbent on going belly up. Water changes for the 30 have been 50% every 6-7 days. 


So, all this background information leads to two questions:

a) what went wrong in the 30 gallon?
b) how do I fix this?

At the moment, I'm going with the nuke everything and start over approach for fixing the 30. I'm removing the substrate (I'll get sand as soon as I can transport it), and giving the tank a good scrubbing with water, and maybe some hydrogen peroxide. I'll get a new sponge filter, and cycle the tank by squeezing out a sponge from a healthy tank.

I'm still prettymuch an aquarium noob, and I have no idea if my ideas are going to work. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!


----------



## Fish Whisper (Apr 22, 2010)

Well maybe i can help by asking more question...perhaps you may or may not have considered 

Was the location of the tank diffent from the other 2? close to a window or or a door, maybe causing flucuating tempertures, and or Sunlight to cuase excessive algae.

-Was the filter ever left off for an extended time period to partially have it uncycled.
-Was the temperature gauge constant or have u notice it variate?
-How thick was the sand/gravel base, could there have been excessive anaerobic zone?
-Were there carbon in the filter than wasn't changed for extended time period?

Hopefully we can identify the reason and not have that problem not reappear.

Also not 100% sure but i think plants and there roots in particular respirateduring the night, and consume oxygen, was the surface of the water broken up by the filter enough?


----------



## fuzzysocks (Dec 8, 2010)

Great questions, which I hadn't thought of.

I never turned this particular filter off. It's just simple sponge filter fed (driven?) by an airstone at the base, with no carbon. The tank is intended to be a breeding tank, so the goal was to not have a filter that fry could be sucked into. It didn't do a great job of breaking water tension--flakes of food would stay at the surface for quite a while, which wasn't a problem till the angels stopped eating. 

The temperature was constant until the recent cold snap, when my place got fairly chilly. I think the thermometers I have on the tank were normally reading around 24, 25. I will be replacing the heater with a more powerful one that can handle ambient temperatures below 18.

The gravel base is about 5-6 cm in depth. It's coarse gravel that doesn't pack down at all, so I doubt it's anaerobic.

The tank is in a different room than the others. It is near an outside door, but there's almost no natural light in the room. Anyone caught leaving the door open for longer than necessary tends to get pretty thoroughly reamed by yours truly for letting heat out, and there's not much through traffic through it.

Hopefully this narrows things down!


----------



## Fish Whisper (Apr 22, 2010)

Well, it could be a combination of things,
I am not sure what the cause of stress was on the tank,

Good that u have gotten a new filter and clean everything out thoroughly.
Dissolved bleach is also great as chlorine just evaporate, after u rinse and leave it to air dry.

I would try to have less gravel maybe just barely to keep ur plants in place.
Also how was ur plants doing? where there any signs of decay? adjusting the duration of light made a difference


----------

