sick golden topminnow

my usually active male golden topminnow has been swimming vertically the last few days, i put him in an unfurnished quarantine tank with a little salt and some stress coat+ aloe vera for a couple of days, he swam around on the bottom mostly, i put him back yesterday, and he swims vertically again, found him resting vertically in a floating mop, any suggestions. everyone else seems healthy, there have been no recent additions.

checked my water chlorine neative, ammonia.25 nitrite, nitrate0, ph8.0, temp74

Nitrate is 0 ppm and ammonia is 0.25? The tank's not cycled. It should have 0 ppm ammonia and nitrate should be between 10 and 30 ppm.

To paraphrase what I said on http://forum.nanfa.o...in-55-gal-tank/ ,
When fish food is added to the fish tank, whether or not it is eaten, the proteins in the fish food decay into ammonia/ammonium (they're in equilibrium). This ammonia is toxic at even low concentrations; 0.25 parts per million is enough to depress a fish's immune system and make it susceptible to infection by pathogens. There are two methods to removing this toxic compound from the water to prevent it from killing your fish.
1. Bacteria
2. Plants

Bacteria live on the surface areas underwater, for example in your filter's sponge. If your tank has been set up for more than a month, it should have some of this bacteria living in it. Yours doesn't, or it wouldn't have 0 ppm nitrate (the bacteria's waste product is nitrate, so if they were present nitrate would be, too). Things you may be doing that would be killing the bacteria:
1. Failing to dechlorinate the water that you add to your aquarium. Chlorine gas isn't in water naturally. We add it to our tap water on purpose to kill all the bacteria. This includes harmful bacteria, like cholera, but also beneficial bacteria, like the nitrosomonas and nitrospira that you want to encourage to grow in your fish tank.
2. Large pH swings. Is it always pH 8?

You can add bacteria to the tank by buying bottles of it, for example API Quick Start: http://cms.marsfishc...ience sheet.pdf
I like that study because it plots what happens without the bacteria present. The aquarium that didn't receive the bottled beneficial bacteria is what most people's "New Tank Syndrome" looks like; high ammonia the first month of setup (and likely high initial fish death as a result). Notice how the first day everything's fine; it's only about a week in that the ammonia really increases in concentration. If you add bottled bacteria or take a month to add fish flakes to the tank before adding fish you can avoid exposing your fish to any nonzero ammonia concentration, and avoid the disease and death that results from this 'new tank syndrome'. Then all you have to do is the standard water change schedule to keep nitrate under 30 ppm.

Now plants are different than bacteria. They're visible, for one thing, so you can see if you have them or not. There's no guesswork. If they double in size every month, they're growing and actively eating both ammonium and nitrate. And a second difference is that they remove both ammonium and nitrate from the water column. Bacteria merely convert the nitrogen to a different form, still leaving it floating in the water. Plants take nitrogen out of the water and use it to build new plant tissue. Conservation of mass: new leaves have to come from somewhere.

Also, plants are capable of reacting if the aquarium environment changes. What happens if the tank is stable but then one of your fish dies and starts to rot? The ammonia coming from its rotting corpse could harm all of your other fish. That's why it's really cool that plants switch from eating nitrate to eating ammonium whenever ammonium is present. In a purely bacterially filtered tank, the bacteria could take days or weeks to increase in population enough to remove the extra ammonia from a spike. Plants remove even ridiculously high concentrations of ammonium in four hours. Source: http://www.theaquari...m_Over_Nitrates

Can you use both plants and beneficial bacteria to filter your tank? Yes.
Plants eat nitrate, too. Nitrate is the waste product at the end of bacterial ammonia processing, and builds up if you only have bacterial filtration. This accumulation of nitrate is why most people do frequent (weekly or biweekly) water changes. Nitrate is less toxic than ammonia, which kills at even 0.5 or 1 ppm. Nitrate usually isn't toxic until about 30 ppm, with toxicity varying depending on the species of fish. That basically means that almost thirty times the number of nitrates is still not as poisonous as 1 ammonia. So bacteria, which convert ammonia into nitrate, are useful. But they're not as useful as plants, which instead of simply converting the ammonia and delaying you having to deal with the problem, remove it completely. Remember how I said that plants actually take nitrogen from the water column and permanently remove it, using the nitrogen to make their new leaves and stems. They will remove nitrate from the water of a bacterially filtered tank, too. This could lead to an aquarium that does not accumulate nitrate and require water changes in the traditional nitrate-removing sense of the word, as discussed more in Diana Walstad's book, "Ecology of the Planted Aquarium". My own tanks have lots and lots of plants and probably very little bacteria, as the plants are eating both the ammonium and the nitrate, preventing either from accumulating.

You don't have to have a green thumb to have plant filtration in your tank. Floating plant species are very easy. You don't need a special substrate or have to change anything about your tank; you just plop them in and they float on the surface and do their job. When they start to cover up too much of the surface, scoop half of them off and sell them on aquabid.com. That's another perk to plant versus bacterial filtration; not only do they clean your water but selling them pays you back for their initial purchase cost. Here's the floating plant section on aquabid: http://www.aquabid.c...cgi?liveplantsf

I recommend full spectrum bulbs for reasons I discuss under the username of Okiimiru on this forum: http://www.ratemyfis.../topic5058.html but floating plants aren't picky and will most likely do well with whatever light you already have. Try a few species instead of just one, and you're bound to find one that likes your existing tank conditions. With the pH of 8 in your tank in particular, our own native ceratophyllum demersum might be a good match.

Edited by EricaWieser, 20 December 2012 - 03:54 AM.

my tank is mature, 8.0 is the ph of my tapwater, which tests neg for chlorine i usually do weekly changes but missed this week, ammonia is .25 is that high enough for a problem ? tank has 7or 8 other topminnows, a flagfish, 3 mollies, and 5 small swamp darters, tank is planted with jave fern, ababy sagitarius, (which is not doing well) and some floating plants, detritus is building up abit on bottom, nitrate is 0 thats not good for plants is it? the patient is back in quarantine, i will do a water change , get rid of misplaced sagitarious, add more floaters, other fish seem healthy, maybe a little sluggish, but temp is down a couple of degrees, any specific treatment advice?

ammonia is .25 is that high enough for a problem ?

Yes.

nitrate is 0 thats not good for plants is it?

No.

tank is planted with jave fern, ababy sagitarius, (which is not doing well) and some floating plants,

Plants mostly only eat when they're growing. New tissue shows they're removing nitrogen from the water. Rotting tissue shows they're adding it.

any specific treatment advice?

Get the ammonia down to 0 ppm and keep it there.
Get nitrate up to 10 ppm and keep it below 30 ppm.

Edited by EricaWieser, 20 December 2012 - 06:49 PM.

Careful not to confuse the measurable amount of something with the rate of production; they are entirely different things. The fish/food/decaying stuff may be producing adequte ammonia for the plants, but it looks like "zero" when you measure it because the plants are absorbing it. And for nitrate -- the plants may be uptaking it as it is produced, or there might not be any if the plants are storing all the ammonia before it ever gets to become nitrate.

How old is the sick killie? More than 3 yrs? Sometimes the swim baldder is one of things that goes out when fish get old.

Edited by gerald, 20 December 2012 - 08:54 PM.

he died, he was wild caught as an adult about 6 months ago, thanks for the tips, the darters like the detritus on the bottom, but i collected some native plants that are not well suited to my tank maybe dead plant tissue is a factor,.went to store feeling bad bought a pair of nice black mollies, that don't really fit my tank theme, but i want to see some cute little baby fishes, also bought some more plants

Many times the best method is to identify any changes you have made and simply reverse those changes. You should try and keep a healthy balance in the tank at all times. For example you have a ten gallon tank with three average size plants that is doing just fine. Now you introduce three new plants and there might not be enough nutrients to support that many plants so they all have to compete for food. Some may not be able to get by on the reduced nutrients so they start to die off. The decaying plant matter causes a spike in your tank and all of a sudden a fish or two die.

Now you can't understand why a perfectly established tank is having problems. The truth is you no longer have a balanced tank and now you have to try and get things back in balance. The easiest thing to do is remove the extra plants and maintain a water change regiment until you see your tank parameters balance out again.

thanks