aquarium holocaust and a new plan
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
I've just been through an aquarium holocaust. A case of "velvet" compounded by what seems to have been "neon tetra disease" has swept through the larger of the two aquariums, possibly following on the outbreak of the latter in the small aquarium. I had never heard of "neon tetra disease" and couldn't figure out why I was losing fish to what seemed like a simple velvet outbreak in its early days.
Seven fish died in under five days, and it was only when I noticed that one of the corpses, which I'd not been able to spot the day it died, came out of the aquarium with the same fuzziness that I'd witnessed in an earlier outbreak in the small aquarium that killed all but two of the fish there. Working back through the sequence of that outbreak I found myself reading about the weird twisted spine and swimming problems that had plagued the final victim of the earlier outbreak and eventually read the dreaded news: an incurable fungal disease was in the mix in addition to the velvet. This seemed to be confirmed in the lone fish that was clearly on a death spiral despite not exhibiting any signs of velvet at all. The Siamese Algae Eater, more than a decade old, was simply fading while its clear bits (the eyes and base of the fins) were going cloudy.
I'd brought this on (I believe) by using the large aquarium's external filter on the small aquarium for a short time. I did this because the wee filter I've got on the smaller tank sometimes struggles. Now I know that I was picking up a latent population of sporidium when I brought the filter back.
The upshot: I'm down to two of the original six zebra danios, one of the six emperor tetras (surprisingly, it's the one with the hole in the stomach that survived!), "Gill" the angelfish, and the clown pleco "Buddy IV". I have to hand it to the emperor tetra, she survived the first outbreak in the small aquarium, survived having the hole bitten out of her stomach, and then this disaster: she's the Ellen Ripley of ornamental fish.
So I'm going to let the aquariums be for a while. "NTD" never goes away, but I can reduce the population of bad critters by doing a lot of gravel vacuuming and frequent water changes for a few months. Assuming everything stabilizes for a while, I'm going to set up the two aquariums like this and this.