Urgent Tank in crisis

So I have an established 135 gallon aquarium. My fish have been rock solid for 6 years and yesterday for the first time I noticed they all seemed stressed and not a single fish was going after the food I ws putting in the aquarium.

Today, all the fish are hanging around the substrate and have deep 'breathing.' My 6 year old mandarin is all but dead (white, forcing to breath, and not moving). And my Chevron tang looks like his skin is peeling off.

It looks like a lack of oxygen but I have no idea why; nothing has changed on the tank except the fact that I installed a DIY automatic frozen food feeder that runs off of 2 mountain dew bottles and 2 air pumps that was installed a week ago. And I added a flame and potters angel about 3 weeks ago.

I noticed a significant patch of cyano in my fuge and promtly removed it. Would really love some help as I would love to save my fish especially my mandarin.

My inhabitant list:

Hippo Tang
Coral Beauty
Potters Angel
Flame Angel (note all 3 angels do get along fine)
mandarin
Chevron Tang
Bangaii Cardinal
2 O Clowns

Thank you guys

 

So I checked my parameters; I have high ntrates and some ammonia present in the water. I'm guessing that I over fed with my new feeders. I did a 20% water change with water I had prepared two days ago. And I am prepping a new batch already and I will do a 10-20% change tomorrow.

 

That would do it, especially the ammonia. What do you have for CuC?

 

Good luck with everything, nto sure if the reefers are fond of prime or stresscoat but being a FW guy I found in tiems of emergency these products help tremendously in reusing stress and coverting ammonia t oa less toxic form

 

agreed , a product like Seachems Prime (saltwater version of products mentioned above) would be ideal for this type of occasion IMO

Amquel is another product alternative for the saltwater tank that would also deal with those elevated nutrient levels

a water change or 2 is also be a good idea to reduce the levels whilst waiting for bacteria to deal with the excess
dont want to make matters worse doing overly large water change
but a couple of 20% changes in addition to the products mentioned would be my choice of action in an event like this

Steve

 

Thanks for the reply guys,

For cleanup crews I have some snails, a tuxedo urchin, and brittle stars. I never really needed to roll with a large cuc because my tank was always in a pristine state.

I'm pretty bummed out right now.

 

Sending out good vibes that your fish recover and you get things back on track. Good luck!

 

I am, by no means, an expert but I would have concerns about using the mountain dew bottles. How were they cleaned prior to being put into use?

I know that in the past whenever I would refill a soda bottle with water to use as a water bottle, it didn't matter how much I tried to rinse it out, there was always a slight taste of the soda in the water, maybe the residual soda that was left in the bottles is harming your system.

Just a thought, but might be worth a try to take out the automatic feeder or switch the mountain dew bottles with some store bought water bottles until you figure out what is going on.

 

All excellent advice on the feeder. You saw the cyano show up because you had a bunch of sudden nutrients in the tank. Run carbon, keep doing water changes, and use some Prime or Amquel just to keep the toxicity of the ammonia down.

And it's always a good idea to check for stray voltage, if suddenly your fish start acting weird. Not that I think that this is the case now, just thought I would share it, since I went through it once.

 

Thanks again guys. I for some reason was no longer carrying Prime, just went out to buy some. Sadly, my mandarin (6 years), Potters (a month), and Chevron (3 years) passed away. Hopefully the other fish can tough it out.

Brendan, you are correct, I was looking at changing out the Dew bottles for actual sports waterbottles. I've stopped with the automatic feeders for now and I'll redesign them to incorporate new bottles.