# Sudden Death



## MickRC3 (Aug 9, 2010)

My Malawi tank has been set up for just over a month. I was starting out slowly, so the 55gal only had 4 yellow labs, 1 red zebra, 4 other labs whose name escapes me right now (yellow with black vertical stripes, slight orange tint to fins), a cory and a pleco. All young fish, under 2" each and most about an inch, except the pleco (6 inches) which was banished from the community tank when my wife's angelfish spawned. I let my handicapped daughter pick the africans, which is why we ended up with more than one kind of lab and the risk of hybrids.

Anyway, that is not an issue any longer. Today my wife called me at work and said that the labs were dying and so were her angels. Two different tanks, two different rooms, and 9 dead fish in a couple of hours. The labs would swim against the outflow from the external filters for 20-30 minutes and then go into a corner and spin on their long axes until they died. The angels left their spawned eggs and swam rapidly around the tank, bouncing off of the sides and plants until they died. The last water change was 4 days ago and the angels seemed fine until they left their spawn.

My wife is calling the pleco the black widow because death seems to follow it around.


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## GTZ (Apr 21, 2010)

Sounds like something got in the tank, maybe a spray cleaner or some other chemical.


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## iplaywithemotions (Dec 18, 2008)

Yup, sounds like some sort of poisoning.


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## Dj823cichild (Mar 30, 2009)

:-? Man so sorry for your loss!


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## MickRC3 (Aug 9, 2010)

Well, overnight the remaining cichlids died and the cory is now nearly gone. Unlike the cichlids, the cory shows a white film on his head, anal and pectoral fins and gills.

Well nothing to do but do a hard cleaning of the empty tank and start over.


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## eternal10 (Aug 7, 2010)

sorry to hear about this. Sad loss.


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## efenberg (Sep 18, 2010)

Sorry to hear that man. It's a big lost.

But the next time, you will be more careful, I'm sure of that, and all your fish will be more beautiful than before.


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## ozzkoz (Jul 3, 2007)

wow, sorry to hear it. I had almost the same thing happen to my tank, killed off 3/4 before I could get the last few out into a hospital tank. Fish would seem fine, swim at the top, lose buoyancy and die. I did a full water change ad cycled my tank again with ammonia (my bio filter died off when I did the water change). Survivors are back in and seem ok, but I never figured out what killed them. My guess was some sort of poison.


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## immortal (Feb 25, 2006)

Sorry for your loss. Don't let it get you down, give the tanks a good cleaning and start over.


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## ozzkoz (Jul 3, 2007)

how should he clean the tanks? I mentioned something similar happened to me and I only did a full WC and cleaned out filters. Should he remove the sand and somehow clean that? Scrub the inside of the tank with something?


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## DJRansome (Oct 29, 2005)

Problem is without knowing what the toxin was, you don't know how to remove it.


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## zazz (Apr 5, 2008)

the rule is no sprays of any kind in the tank room!


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## Paragon (May 24, 2010)

I hate to ask this, but is there any chance that your daughter thought that she was "helping" the fish stay clean and added something like a detergent or spray to the water? It sounds like something a contientious, but not fish-savvy, child might do.

Does the water smell like anything? Feel like it has a film to it?


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## MickRC3 (Aug 9, 2010)

No, my daughter is handicapped but is 22yrs old and functional. She has Cohen Seizure Syndrome, a rare neural condition. We don't use sprays in the basement, but the cat's litter box is in the bathroom next to the man-cave and my tank. When cleaning it we close the door and run the exhaust fan to keep the dust down.

I think the problem might have been some rocks I added to the tank about 8 days before the incident. I did multiple boil, scrub and rinse cycles of the rocks. Most came from Alaska but one brick-sized piece came from the Black Hills of South Dakota. My buddy was on an extended vacation all over the Northwest and brought back the rocks for me. The Black Hills rock came from the Crazy Horse Monument tailings and may have been blast debris. I didn't think about it at the time, but if it was blast debris it may have had trace substances on it that were burned into it. I'm going to give all of the rocks some more TLC before I put them in a tank again, if ever.


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## walterharris (Sep 19, 2010)

Sorry to hear about that sudden death sometimes theas things happen .Last year my dad added seven anthieas and all in the one batch all from the same lfs added all the same way and one died for no reason.So it goes to show that as hard as we try sadley we will loose some fish


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## Jon E Blaze (Jan 9, 2004)

man that sucks , good luck in the future.


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