high nitrates

[don duncan]

Hello. I recently bought a 135 gallon tank from someone that was already set up. Had some fish in it. I recently checked the NO3 levels and they were 160 or greater. I had just recently added some fish and they all lived. thank god.

I have done 2 water changes in the last week and a half. The first one was 50 gallons, and the second was 40. The nitrate levels are still high (between 40 and 80). What can I do to get the levels lower faster. 2 of my fish now have ick. I believe it is due to the high nitrate levels, as these are the ones I added about a month ago. The original fish are fine.

[AndrewT]

I had the exact same problem when i bought my tank. It too was also previously set up. There is a product that I used from petco that reduced nitrates for a while called amequel or something like that. It worked great to stabilize the nitrates for a bit. I also had a problem with ick too. The best advice i can give is the same thing everyone told me. Give it time wait till the tank stabilizes to add fish. I brought my tank home and put fish in it a week later.One by one every last one died. I lost over 300 in livestock. I waited about 2 months as nitrates slowly declined then attempted to add fish with success. I added a hob refugium a week ago and everythings been great.Hope this helps

[+reeflover]

Hello. I recently bought a 135 gallon tank from someone that was already set up. Had some fish in it. I recently checked the NO3 levels and they were 160 or greater. I had just recently added some fish and they all lived. thank god.

I have done 2 water changes in the last week and a half. The first one was 50 gallons, and the second was 40. The nitrate levels are still high (between 40 and 80). What can I do to get the levels lower faster. 2 of my fish now have ick. I believe it is due to the high nitrate levels, as these are the ones I added about a month ago. The original fish are fine.

You have to give more info, does the tank have live sand, live rock. How long was the move? How long the tank been running now?

If the tank have live sand on it, the move could stired up the live sand which could lead to high nitrate problem. Also depends on the rock you got inside the tank. If the previous owner had bad nitrate in his system. The rock probably leeching back out to you tank now.

What are the 2 fishes got ick? did you put them in QT?

does your skimmer work properly, sufficently? good skimmer also helps to bring down nitrate as well.

do you have refugium? Having macro alges in the refugium to bring nitrate down is the best way by far.

[bimmerzs]

Hello. I recently bought a 135 gallon tank from someone that was already set up. Had some fish in it. I recently checked the NO3 levels and they were 160 or greater. I had just recently added some fish and they all lived. thank god.

I have done 2 water changes in the last week and a half. The first one was 50 gallons, and the second was 40. The nitrate levels are still high (between 40 and 80). What can I do to get the levels lower faster. 2 of my fish now have ick. I believe it is due to the high nitrate levels, as these are the ones I added about a month ago. The original fish are fine.

Hi,

When doing your water changes, make sure you mix the water at least overnight in order to thoroughly mix the salt and also aerate the water. It's also a good idea to match temp and ph of the water so that you won't shock your coral's/livestock. Here are good article's on nitrate reduction and recommended tank parameter's. http://melevsreef.com/reducing_nitrates.html http://www.melevsreef.com/parms.html

Cheers,

Edited November 22, 2008 by bimmerzs

[tropheusmaster]

macro alge will become A sexual and turn water cloudy and kill all in tank. be careful with it!!!, your tank prolly started a new cycle it needs time, a good cleaner fish or shrimp will help clean the ick off, sometimes add garlic to food to kill parasites hope this helps.

[John Maloney]

macro algae is pretty easy to keep. certain macros like caulerpa have a greater tendency to go sexual when compared to the hardy chaeto. However, you can keep caulerpa from going sexual by leaving the light on it 24 hours. If you keep it on a normal cycle you will have to trim it to keep it healthy. For pure filtering, those are the macros you want to look at for a primary nutrient exporter. Other good choices are gracilaria and ulva.

[JEN H]

I think that the tank probably needs time to be established before you add fish..... It's a good idea not to rush the fish addition part. Even when adding fish, we have found that adding them slowly vs. quickly is better for our tank and the health of our fish.

It is IMPERATIVE that you quarantine fish first prior to putting them in your tank. We learned this the hard way through some ill fish getting in our tank and having a scare that other fish were going to have the same issues. Ever since then, we have quarantined everything prior to going in. It has been worth it, as we have caught quite a few fish with illnesses that we were either able to treat and then put into the tank or return to the LFS. It's easy to set up a QT tank, but you have to really be diligent on water changes and ensure water quality is good....especially if you have a sick fish in there!

As for ick, I think that while not 100% good, it is some-what of a natural part of the fish environment...especially when dealing with salt water. We had one outbreak, but that was due to stress. If you keep the stress in your tank low, I would venture to guess that ick outbreaks will probably disappear. HOWEVER, we also feed our fish garlic with all food. In addition, we have been subsidizing their food with liquid Centrum multi-vitamins. When we started the vitamins, we saw a huge improvement in fish activity as well as health etc. We essentially use an eye dropper to add it to food prior to feeding. Since the vitamin is strong enough for a human, you don't need to give them too much. We usually use a drop of vitamin per frozen cube, and that has seemed to work well.

If that doesn't work.... try ick attack. There is a type of this product that is safe for fish, corals, and inverts. You have to treat for 2 weeks, remove any carbon in your filtration, and then do a 20% water change at the end of treatment. We used it when we had the outbreak, and it worked very well. We were pleased.

Good luck!

[don duncan]

Well I pulled all the fish. Treated them in a QT tank for 3 weeks (meds, higher temp, and lower salintiy). Lost only one, don't know why he died. I did a 100% water change in the main tank and let the tank sit fallow for 3 weeks and watched the nitrates. Everything seems ok. Fish did get streesed in the QT eventhough I did frequent water changes. Started to get fin rot i guess. They have been re-introduced into the tank. Everyone seems happy. My Coral beauty has popey now. I am going to watch him. He seems active and is eating well.

Thanks everyone

[JEN H]

Popeye can be a bad deal.... My husband and I put a long fin heniochus in our tank prior to adopting our quarantine policy like we have now. It got popeye.... He was swimming around like normal, but we thought it would be best to get him out of our fish population in case he had something that would spread. We put it into QT with meds (I don't think anyone really knows what causes that, but we thought it could be a bacterial infection or quite possibly tuberculosis--yeah...fish can get that from what I have read). We put him in QT....he stopped eating after a few days. We tried everything even live brine. He would try to go for them, but would run into the side of the tank (I suppose because he couldn't see well). His popeye of one eye turned into both..... He died 1 week to the hour after we put him into quarantine. Luckily, whatever caused it did not spread to other fish in the tank. However, that was the day we decided to QT everything.

QT can be stressful, but there are things you can do to help your fish through that. One would be to put some kind of rock and plastic plant in the bare tank to give them a place to hide. Another would be to keep the lights out as much as possible. Yet another would be to ensure that they are kept in a place without very much traffic.

I hope your guys DO NOT have fin rot, because if they do, there is no curing that….and it can spread to other fish. Question…what did you treat them with in QT? Copper?

[don duncan]

yes i treated them with copper. The Sail fin's tail had small nicks in it. His tail is now better.

The maroon, and coral also had nicks in the fins. The maroon is better now. His tail is healing.

I am going to keep an eye on the Koran and coral beauty. The coral beauty is the one with popeye.

I will keep you informed as to how they do.

Thanks for all the feed back.

[don duncan]

What type of QT tank setup do you have?

How often do you have to do water changes in the QT tank

[caferacermike]

CU+reef tank=disaster.

I hope you did not add any copper to the tank itself. Small amounts of it in a reef tank can really screw things up. Large amounts can wreak havoc.

[JEN H]

My husband just have a small tank that we use on a needed basis. I think that it is possibly 15 gallons. We essentially have a small hang on the back filter, we have two plants that we suction cup to the bottom, and we have a heating element to ensure that the temp stays normal. We just use poly filter for the filter unit. Last time, we used an amonia filter. We fill the QT tank with water from our 210 gallon tank. From there, we treat it with the copper as instructed and test daily.

We test the water parameters daily, and make small water changes either daily or every-other day. We make sure not to feed too much to the fish in the tank.... It's better to make multiple very small offerings to ensure everything is eaten.

When we do the water changes, I use a hose to ensure that I am sucking up any dead food or pooh from the bottom of the tank.

That's really it. It's a pretty simple set up. We also ensure that we use none of our items we are using in the QT tank with the copper in our big or other small tank. That would be bad for our inverts and corals. We just keep everything separate. Once we are done with it, we rinse it out and soak our filter, plants, etc in water with vinegar...rinse and store for the next time we nee it.

Hope this helps!