Kailani

Thank you for the help and advice. I was able to talk to the owner of the local shop I got the fish from and he said something similar. he said he doesn’t believe in preemptively medicate fish, only adding anything that isn’t water conditioner when you have to. only the Cory’s seemed to be breathing hard and sadly they all passed away but I went out and bought a second air stone to hopefully help the remaining fish. since the shop owner couldn’t find any issue he could give me an answer for he told me to keep testing for ammonia and make sure there’s no temperature fluctuation but other then that just wait and see for a week. I’ll do that for a bit but if I lose another fish I think I’ll change out the water to get the meds out and see if that helps them.

Both of my display tanks and quarantine tank don’t have heaters. At ambient temperature the tanks stay around 80 all year around but I have a heater in case of emergency but it’s not in a tank at the moment

I’m going to try calling the store tonight. when I got the fish the woman working said she wasn’t a fish person so she could only answer my questions about having all fish tank run on local water with water conditioner and whether they medicate the fish in shop or not. I’d never been to this store before that so hopefully their fish person is in

I was expecting difficulty with the otos eating because I heard that too. I got some brown diatom algae in the tank to hopefully help them eat along with wafers and repashy so I’d have options. i got albinos because people have said they’re a hardy fish so when I found so many died in the morning I started freaking out that something was really wrong with the tank I just couldn’t figure it out. i rinsed the tank only with water and left it to air dry because I was afraid of not rinsing it well enough and accidentally leaving chemicals in the tank so maybe not using chemicals to make sure it was 100% sterile is part of the problem… in the time I posted this till now the last two Cory’s died along with another oto but unlike the first one the second has a badly curved spine. I’m still testing and watching the tank but I still can’t pinpoint my issue.

Thank you for all the helpful links and advice. I don’t have a betta currently as mine died of old age a few months ago. But I might get another one for my 5g tank later on. i’m not at all a tech person but I’ll try to figure out the YouTube thing. 😅 I’ll try getting some more air stones to have on hand and add another. I only have one in my sponge filter right now which is the only equipment in my tank. I live in the tropics so I have a heater in case I need it to help medicate or some emergency but my tank’s temperature stays at 80 degrees so I’ll look up some methods for how people cool down their tanks in case. I used the aquarium co-op med trio method of dosing all meds at once and watching for a week

Thank you for the advice and encouragement. I’ll look into getting some beneficial bacteria. adding too many fish at once was definitely not smart of me. I’d used the growing plants method as well as adding a sponge filter and air stone that’d been running in my main display tank for over a year so I thought it’d be okay based on what I’ve seen people do online but they were experts so I must have messed up somewhere.

They are from a local store. the woman that helped me in the store told me to let them sit in the bag in the tank for at least 20 minutes before I put them in, so they were put into the tank after about 40 minutes of floating in bags. I have live aquarium plants in my quarantine tank thinking it helps water quality so i didn’t add any salt.

I’m quite new to the hobby having only had cherry barbs and Betta fish. I apologize for such a long post. I got 5 albino corys, 5 otocinclus and 3 cherry barbs yesterday that seemed fine so I put them in my quarantine tank (after acclimation) with the aquarium co-op med trio but when I woke up in the morning I had lost 3 albino corydoras and 1 otocinclus. I walked away from the tank to get my test kits and when I got back another Cory was on its side not moving so I netted it out and into the container the other dead fish were in but out of the corner of my eye I saw it’s water move so I took a video of what I think is the Cory gasping and stuck on its side. ( I can’t figure out how to upload videos though…) Not wanting to leave it in that cup I put him back in the tank. he kinda barrel rolled to the bottom and laid on its side again sadly I don’t think he’ll last long. I did some water tests that showed at least to me that everything was in safe parameters ( the api ammonia test is bright yellow) water temperature is around 80 I must be doing something wrong I just don’t know what. can anyone enlighten me? this is a photo of the one living fish when it was in the container with the ones that had passed side note: while the barbs are swimming around and seem fine one has a “pimple” like thing below it’s mouth I don’t know if I should be concerned about