We have a 38 gallon bowfront tank. It is fully cycled and stocked with:
2 dwarf gouramis, 4 golden barbs, 2 Cory cats, a bristlenose pleco, and 3 angelfish. I know we are on the side of being overstocker but according to aqadvisor it's at 118% so still within safe zone with water changes. we got the angelfish about 2 weeks ago and now two of them are swiming at an angle or sideways. The only thing we did over the past few days was add more plants and start using some sinking pellets for the cats. Automatically we did a 50% water change and tested our water and saw a spike in the ammonia . So I'm guessing this is what is causing the angels to swim this way but my question is what caused the spike... nothing has died (yet) and we do a 25% water change every 1-2 weeks. I know ammonia is due to waste product either by feces or in eaten food but we clean regularly as for the sinking pellets we only put 2 in at a time. The flakes we give are usually eaten before giving more. When we do our water changes we vacuum the gravel. So I'm just baffled. This is our first "big" tank and we just started doing the whole aquarium hobbies thing in February but started with a 5.5 gallon with a betta and some tetras after keeping everything alive for 2 months we wanted to go bigger and did so in May. We really enjoy our new hobby. And love our fish. Any advice would be welcome. Thanks
2 dwarf gouramis, 4 golden barbs, 2 Cory cats, a bristlenose pleco, and 3 angelfish. I know we are on the side of being overstocker but according to aqadvisor it's at 118% so still within safe zone with water changes. we got the angelfish about 2 weeks ago and now two of them are swiming at an angle or sideways. The only thing we did over the past few days was add more plants and start using some sinking pellets for the cats. Automatically we did a 50% water change and tested our water and saw a spike in the ammonia . So I'm guessing this is what is causing the angels to swim this way but my question is what caused the spike... nothing has died (yet) and we do a 25% water change every 1-2 weeks. I know ammonia is due to waste product either by feces or in eaten food but we clean regularly as for the sinking pellets we only put 2 in at a time. The flakes we give are usually eaten before giving more. When we do our water changes we vacuum the gravel. So I'm just baffled. This is our first "big" tank and we just started doing the whole aquarium hobbies thing in February but started with a 5.5 gallon with a betta and some tetras after keeping everything alive for 2 months we wanted to go bigger and did so in May. We really enjoy our new hobby. And love our fish. Any advice would be welcome. Thanks
so we are just going to try to fix the problems we have now and just keep the gouramis cats and barbs... possibly just start over if everything dies... he kind of had new tank syndrome (although the angels were added when everything was at the right levels) whereas I wanted to wait longer... he agreed to wait now since they all died. We are still going to talk to our LFS to see what else could have spiked the ammonia after only adding plants.