I know what you mean. I stopped trying to keep them for years for that exact reason. The problem with these fish is they seem very susceptible to some sort of bacterial disease that I have yet to find which. It starts with heavy breathing then just seem to go. I've seen this happen so many times and have yet to.save one.
I knew it wasn't the case on this occasion because it heppened to all three at the same time. They seemed to have settled a lot. As crazy as it seems I left the log soaking in water for 24hours and tried it again, just one though. Everything seems fine for now. I also added a bit of KH. I've been trying to reduce the TDS of the tank for a few months but I forget that doing 50% changes bi weekly drastically reduces KH. Water out my tap has no measurable kh/gh with a tds of 39ppm. I can't rule out I may have crashed the system through low kh combined with 2 of these logs and a few oak leaves. Seems odd the the ph was only 6.2 with a.green dc when thus occured. My kh only measured 2 degrees in the tank. The lights had been on nearly 3 hours by then so I suppose I could have came home to an aftermath of something that had happened earlier when the lights were off.
Other option I guess could have been something on the logs that needed rinsed off first. Don't know, bit of a mystery to me. Whatever happened it happened fast, was severe and only affected the Rams.
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