This is a long and terrible story. If you're not into sad tales of deceit, stupidity and fish torture, please hit the back button.
I'm an organic gardener, and part of that is keeping water in a pair of open 20 gallon barrels. It lets tap water dechlorinate over time, and keeps the water warm in the sun for watering my plants. A neighbor voiced a concern that I was providing a breeding ground for mosquitoes, so I went looking for a natural solution to prevent that.
I popped into the local fish store, and explained my problem to the nice lady tending the tanks. her suggestion (which I had no reason to doubt at the time) was a handful of wonderful koi - they were even on sale! (Remember that warning above? You can still bail now before it gets scary.)
They sold me 6 3" koi (my wife always wanted some, and the lady told me they'd even eat out of my hand) and a pair of 40 gallon powerhead filters. I brought them home, ran the filters for a few hours to clean out the first tank, while the bag of fish floated and reached the right temp. Then I released them into their new 'pond'. They actually seemed to enjoy it. They swam around in circles, and were willing to eat a tiny bit of red spirulina pellets within the hour. Success!
I went upstairs to hop onto google and research my new friends and learn about their needs, but other duties called and I had to leave it till the morning.
Very early the next morning, I started to read about koi and started to feel a little bit of shock. Pet store lady (and the more knowledgeable manager who picked out the pumps after hearing my needs a second time) forgot to mention they could live 20 to 30 years, and grow to 2 to 3 feet each. Did not mention that they needed much more and much warmer water than I'd put them into, didn't mention chlorine, nitrogen, ammonia, nitrites, nitrates - or, perhaps most importantly, that they had a tendency to jump out when unhappy with conditions.
At sunup, with dread, I headed out to the garden, and found three on the ground - two stiff and dead, and a third gasping. I scooped out water washed him, and inspected him - he seemed to be breathing, and didn't have any obvious cuts or scratches, and I returned him to the entirely inadequate bin.
Caveat Emptor entered my mind at this point.
I covered the poor guys to prevent any more jumps, and waited for my wife to wake up, at which time we had a serious discussion about how we were going to deal with this terrible mistake we had made. Obviously, what we had going on wasn't going to work. We had to dispose of them humanely, find a home for them, or try our best to take care of them properly.
We did more reading, and decided to try and save them. We went to a different store ( the first one has lost our business for good) and explained our situation. Not a lot of sympathy, but they were more than happy to sell us a 29 gallon tank with an over-the-side filter, hood and heater, with some water conditioner, gravel a few rocks and a tiny pleco (to help with algae - necessary, they told me) and a few cheap live plants. (I'm not sure what this fish store was thinking either, unless they also just wanted to sell as much as they could.)
We went home, set up the tank, got the water to the same temperature as the water the fish were in, conditioned it and transferred the remaining 4.
For the first few days, things seemed great. I had a lot of concerns that I wasn't cycling this tank properly, that there would be serious ammonia problems while the bacteria established itself, and those concerns were found to be true. About a week in, the perky fish started to get lethargic and the water started to get pretty smelly. I pulled the plants and started doing a 10% water change every morning, and while it started getting worse slower, it certainly wan't getting any better. After 5 days of 10% changes, I got very concerned and did a 60% water change, and set up that powerhead filter the first store sold me. The water improved considerably, and 3 of my 4 perked right up. Fish #4 ("bruce") didn't seem as happy as the rest. Within 4 hours, he was glued to the bottom of the tank, seeming to strain at breathing. Within 8 hours, we were pretty worried - he looked like there was a coating of grey over him, milky eyes, and he wasn't moving at all, except for very fast and seemingly shallow breathing.
Back to the store, where I bought the test kit and gravel siphon they should have had me get the first time, and a discussion with the staff. They suggested Brucie was stressed from the large water change, and suggested I pick up a small container of ammo lock, just in case.
I got home, bruce was looking worse, and I ran all of the tests I had. Nitrite 0/Nitrate 0/Ammonia 3-4 ppm/PH 8.0 Obviously, I had an ammonia problem (and this was after a 60% water change - I don't even want to think about what these guys were in before.) I cleaned the gravel (Wow, was it dirty - I pulled 5 gallons of dirty muck and then stopped, because I don't want to cycle any more water today.) and added the ammo-lock. i also added 6 tablespoons of pure sea salt, prediluted in tank water and raised the tank temperature to 78 degrees, according to several sites describing that as a good way to reduce the risk of disease for stressed koi.
And that's where I am now. An uncycled tank, an uncontrolled ammonia spike, three limping fish and one that looks about down for the count, and a tiny pleco that hasn't shown one bit of distress since this whole tragedy started, just munching away at whatever he finds in the tank, and staying out of his big buddy's way.
Sorry to write an epic here - especially with my first post, but I wanted to get as much information in as possible. I need to go through a crash course on freshwater tank crisis management, and if any pros out there can give me good advice on what else to do, I'd like to hear it. Including saying goodbye, if this is hopeless.
Once this crisis is over, we intend to start plans on larger tanks for a year, and then moving up plans on that pond we always wanted to build to next summer, instead of "sometime."
I'm an organic gardener, and part of that is keeping water in a pair of open 20 gallon barrels. It lets tap water dechlorinate over time, and keeps the water warm in the sun for watering my plants. A neighbor voiced a concern that I was providing a breeding ground for mosquitoes, so I went looking for a natural solution to prevent that.
I popped into the local fish store, and explained my problem to the nice lady tending the tanks. her suggestion (which I had no reason to doubt at the time) was a handful of wonderful koi - they were even on sale! (Remember that warning above? You can still bail now before it gets scary.)
They sold me 6 3" koi (my wife always wanted some, and the lady told me they'd even eat out of my hand) and a pair of 40 gallon powerhead filters. I brought them home, ran the filters for a few hours to clean out the first tank, while the bag of fish floated and reached the right temp. Then I released them into their new 'pond'. They actually seemed to enjoy it. They swam around in circles, and were willing to eat a tiny bit of red spirulina pellets within the hour. Success!
I went upstairs to hop onto google and research my new friends and learn about their needs, but other duties called and I had to leave it till the morning.
Very early the next morning, I started to read about koi and started to feel a little bit of shock. Pet store lady (and the more knowledgeable manager who picked out the pumps after hearing my needs a second time) forgot to mention they could live 20 to 30 years, and grow to 2 to 3 feet each. Did not mention that they needed much more and much warmer water than I'd put them into, didn't mention chlorine, nitrogen, ammonia, nitrites, nitrates - or, perhaps most importantly, that they had a tendency to jump out when unhappy with conditions.
At sunup, with dread, I headed out to the garden, and found three on the ground - two stiff and dead, and a third gasping. I scooped out water washed him, and inspected him - he seemed to be breathing, and didn't have any obvious cuts or scratches, and I returned him to the entirely inadequate bin.
Caveat Emptor entered my mind at this point.
I covered the poor guys to prevent any more jumps, and waited for my wife to wake up, at which time we had a serious discussion about how we were going to deal with this terrible mistake we had made. Obviously, what we had going on wasn't going to work. We had to dispose of them humanely, find a home for them, or try our best to take care of them properly.
We did more reading, and decided to try and save them. We went to a different store ( the first one has lost our business for good) and explained our situation. Not a lot of sympathy, but they were more than happy to sell us a 29 gallon tank with an over-the-side filter, hood and heater, with some water conditioner, gravel a few rocks and a tiny pleco (to help with algae - necessary, they told me) and a few cheap live plants. (I'm not sure what this fish store was thinking either, unless they also just wanted to sell as much as they could.)
We went home, set up the tank, got the water to the same temperature as the water the fish were in, conditioned it and transferred the remaining 4.
For the first few days, things seemed great. I had a lot of concerns that I wasn't cycling this tank properly, that there would be serious ammonia problems while the bacteria established itself, and those concerns were found to be true. About a week in, the perky fish started to get lethargic and the water started to get pretty smelly. I pulled the plants and started doing a 10% water change every morning, and while it started getting worse slower, it certainly wan't getting any better. After 5 days of 10% changes, I got very concerned and did a 60% water change, and set up that powerhead filter the first store sold me. The water improved considerably, and 3 of my 4 perked right up. Fish #4 ("bruce") didn't seem as happy as the rest. Within 4 hours, he was glued to the bottom of the tank, seeming to strain at breathing. Within 8 hours, we were pretty worried - he looked like there was a coating of grey over him, milky eyes, and he wasn't moving at all, except for very fast and seemingly shallow breathing.
Back to the store, where I bought the test kit and gravel siphon they should have had me get the first time, and a discussion with the staff. They suggested Brucie was stressed from the large water change, and suggested I pick up a small container of ammo lock, just in case.
I got home, bruce was looking worse, and I ran all of the tests I had. Nitrite 0/Nitrate 0/Ammonia 3-4 ppm/PH 8.0 Obviously, I had an ammonia problem (and this was after a 60% water change - I don't even want to think about what these guys were in before.) I cleaned the gravel (Wow, was it dirty - I pulled 5 gallons of dirty muck and then stopped, because I don't want to cycle any more water today.) and added the ammo-lock. i also added 6 tablespoons of pure sea salt, prediluted in tank water and raised the tank temperature to 78 degrees, according to several sites describing that as a good way to reduce the risk of disease for stressed koi.
And that's where I am now. An uncycled tank, an uncontrolled ammonia spike, three limping fish and one that looks about down for the count, and a tiny pleco that hasn't shown one bit of distress since this whole tragedy started, just munching away at whatever he finds in the tank, and staying out of his big buddy's way.
Sorry to write an epic here - especially with my first post, but I wanted to get as much information in as possible. I need to go through a crash course on freshwater tank crisis management, and if any pros out there can give me good advice on what else to do, I'd like to hear it. Including saying goodbye, if this is hopeless.
Once this crisis is over, we intend to start plans on larger tanks for a year, and then moving up plans on that pond we always wanted to build to next summer, instead of "sometime."
