Comments | kibe: R.I.P Vyvian and Cardinal Biggles

kibe

R.I.P Vyvian and Cardinal Biggles

May 04, 2006 16:36

You were lovely fish. I'm sorry we were rubbish fish parents. :(

Comments 14

gemlil May 4 2006, 18:02:04 UTC

My commiserations

kibe May 4 2006, 21:34:15 UTC

Thanks. Luckily we hadn't got too attached. And Cardinal Fang and Cardinal Ximenez don't seem to down about the whole thing, so that's ok.

franno May 4 2006, 22:57:45 UTC

I'm sorry honey. *hugs*

kibe May 5 2006, 06:55:27 UTC

Thanks sweetie. :)

insaneexistence May 5 2006, 01:09:24 UTC

Wow that didn't take long! What happened? Feel free to email me for tips if you like.

kibe May 5 2006, 06:55:13 UTC

Vyvian looks listless when we first brought him home, and he just got worse. He would swim a bit, then sink to the bottom... gradually he was spending more and more time on his side. His scales appeared to be coming away, although we weren't sure if that was because of some disease or because the other fish were hassling him. :(

Biggles was a pleco, I'm not sure he should have been in that tank, I don't know much about them but apparantly they're kind of tropical and we have no heater.

insaneexistence May 5 2006, 11:23:23 UTC

What I found works is to get a book or read up somewhere about the specific species, then get a pH testing kit and heater, and make sure the water is exactly right. IIRC, that scale thing used to happen because of the water being too acidic, which can sometimes happen if the filtration is insufficient. If you have a community tank, sometimes you have to find a good tradeoff between what conditions suit what species better. The other thing that can sometimes shock fish is when all their water is changed at once, because temperature, pH, and water hardness changes.

kibe May 5 2006, 14:51:30 UTC

We let them settle and then put them in after putting in water treatment stuff. However, we didn't have a pump or anything, which can't have helped. I would have expected more help from the pet shop people, as we did ask about keeping all 4 species together and whether we'd need anything specific. Adam knows someone at work who keeps fish who gaves us treatment (far too late). We have a book on aquarium fish, but not a detailed enough one, and all the pet shop books were crap. Handy to know about the acidic water thing though, will have to bear that in mind, we should get a good filter going on - we weren't sure if it was necessary with cold water fishies, but clearly there were a bit more fragile than we were anticipating.

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