the loss of one of my new little dudes..
As you can se from my last post, I restocked my fish tank a few weeks ago with a seriously cool (and agressive) breed of African Cichlid, the Lake Tanganyika Tropheus Moliro and Tropheus Duboisi. Unfortunately one of the Duboisi’s refused to eat last weekend and died yesterday. Once the sick fish was identified (about 2 days of it not eating) I picked up a medium sized breeding enclosure to seperate him from the others in case it was a stress related illness caused by the other agressive fish. The death was 3 weeks after their introduction to the rebuilt tank and I could not explain why the death had occurred as I have been extremely cautious of the tank toxidity and water quality attributes and could only conclude that aggression was the cause of the stress related symptoms. The tank was at a stable 9.0 pH level (perfect for Lake Tanganyika cichlids), I had been using Tanganyaka buffers & cichlid lake salts, performing moderately aggressive 15-20% weekly water changes so there was really no excuse for the sickness.
The tank is a 200L with a 1200L/h cannister filter located underneath the tank. What had actually happened was that after the last weekend’s water change, I had replaced the shut off taps as the old one’s seals were starting to leak. Once I had closed up the cabinets below the tank after the water change, the inlet tubing had become kinked! It wasn’t until 3 days later that I heard the filter struggling to pump water and upon closer inspection noticed the kink and relative lack of water volume through the outlet hose into the tank. This will have no doubt caused a severe degradation to nitrification process and subsequently would have been extremely harmful to the new fish. Considering these little dudes are a lot harder to keep than the normal ‘run of the mill’ Cichlids, this would have no doubt been the cause of the death of my poor little Duboisi.
Filed under: m.o