Another tank bites the dust. Soaked floor again..

[sciencefiction]

Well, another boring post by me. I've been a bit reluctant to look at the tank inhabitants properly these days. I suppose I think that if I don't see the problem, it's not there. But generally things have been quiet in terms of health and fish are still showing up for breakfast. Right now whoever survived seems fine..
As in my previous posts, I did experience a mass platy die off and it also affected the corydoras fish. I am suspecting a parasitic problem spreading and dying off eventually judging by the symptoms I observed. All these fish have been intermixed before so it wasn't like I infected one tank with the other. It's just one of those fish things caused by the stress of moving and bad water quality.

 

[Andy D]

Hopefully the upwards trend continues.

 

[sciencefiction]

Thanks Andy. I hope so too.

I had a 3 day "filter battle". One of the external filters was sucking up air, to the point of nearly stopping and I couldn't figure out where the air leak came from. Normally that happens when my prefilter sponges get clogged or the water level drops and exposes connection parts of the intake(I never let this happen, almost) But the connection parts were all submerged under water. And I have an identical filter set next to it that wasn't having air issues with the same water level(these filter pipes were set to work in a taller tank before)
This drove me mad. I cleaned filter media, the hoses, impeller, put some proper "Vaseline" on the O-rings, etc...nothing at all, thought the filter is bust.
In the end I found a tiny crack in the plastic parts above the water, like a tiny hair line which was very hard to see. I put a plastic hose over it, like a glove, and it finally solved the problem.
A second nitrite spike would have certainly wiped my tank considering what happened to the poor fishes not long ago.

I also observed the first pleco fight. They started pushing each other over a piece of boiled carrot despite me putting a 2nd one further down the tank but they were not having it. Normally each of the plecos takes a piece and leaves the other pleco alone. Not to be this time and it wasn't nice to see but they didn't hurt each other.

The small pleco was the bigger offender. He arched himself like a bow and was attacking the big pleco going after him like a mad puppy. The big pleco would in turn swim away and then swim back at him at speed trying to "sweep him off his feet" as he normally does to other smaller fish at food time. Needless to say that ended up with a boiled carrot mess in the tank flying everywhere which I just removed and the fight stopped. No more carrots for them.