# My peacock's eyes have turned white!



## riarocks (Oct 5, 2010)

Hey everyone,

I bought a peacock just a few days ago for my 75-gal tank. The tank just cleared up through a cycle due to changing out too much water, and I thought my tank could handle the addition of one extra fish.

I currently have a blood parrot, a texas cichlid, a bristle-nose pleco, and now the peacock (I was told to my surprise that it would be OK to add an african cichlid as long as the pH was roughly the same as at the store.)

Today I came home from work and my peacock's eyes are white and pointy! I'm not exactly sure if it's an infection caused by stress, and whether or not he's contagious? I posted two pictures below.

So I checked the water quality levels and, (please bare with me I only have test STRIPS right now)... no chlorine, a very, very small level or nitrites and nitrates (harmless levels), the water is exactly in the middle with hardness/softness (it says 'soft' but not 'very soft', etc), and... the scariest part... the pH is not even measurable, it's so low. Unless my strips are defective, the pH reads below 6!!!

My other fish are fine and happy, but just in case I added a little aquarium salt, and I threw 4 small seashells in there to raise the pH.

I have no idea what I'm doing right now; I've had a sickness-free aquarium for 6 years and I've never had to deal with this before. He is not looking so good and I feel absolutely horrible


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## GTZ (Apr 21, 2010)

Tanks don't go through cycles due to changing too much water, unless you're changing 100%, don't use dechlorinator and the tank just finished it's cycle. How much water did you change?
How long has the tank been running? How did you cycle the tank? What is the ammonia reading? How often and how much water do you normally change?
What else is in the tank? Just a blood parrot, a texas cichlid, a bristle-nose pleco, and now the peacock? Can you test KH? Get yourself a liquid test kit.


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## riarocks (Oct 5, 2010)

I upgraded from a very established 55-gal a little over a month ago. It's sort of a long story, but everything was fine with the swap, the water quality was perfect. I was doing my weekly water change (I do 30%-40% weekly depending on what my my test strips look like). My canister filter fell out of it's position in the new cabinet and pinched off the outtake tubes causing a buildup of weird transparent film that came spewing out into the tank when I straightened the tube out. Of course this happened after my water change I had just done, so I siphoned out a little more water just to try to suck up as much as that film as I could (I don't know if the film harmful or not?)

So I probably ended up changing too much water. I tried to be careful but of course the following few weeks yielded cloudy water and nitrite and ammonia spikes. Obviously it caused my tank to cycle.

The BP, texas, pleco, and peacock are all I have for stock right now. I'm trying to hold off on adding too much at once as to not throw off the delicate ecosystem in the tank right now.

Like I said, this evening when I noticed the peacock was looking a little, uh, blind... I checked the pH as it was the first thing that popped into my head and it was below 6. I threw in enough baking soda until the pH is finally back around 7 (the strips are hard to read, I know. It's between 6.8 and 7.2 and that is my final answer).

I covered the tank with a black blanket for two hours and-- get this-- after two hours, removed the blanket and voila-- the peacock is back to it's normal self. No white eyes or weird spots on his fins/body. I suppose it was due to extreme stress, as far as I can see?

It's only been two hours. I'll keep updating in the coming days. Any advice is definitely welcome


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## DJRansome (Oct 29, 2005)

I never saw the extreme points like that, but I find when my fish's eyes are injured (bashing into a sharp rock because of being chased), they do clear up amazingly fast without treatment as long as the water is clean (nitrates < 20ppm).

Good news. :thumb:


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