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Originally Posted by Church
I do have a good fish shop near, I'll go check that out. The tank I believe is a 20 gallon and I've put no more than 5 fish in there. I use Hagan filters and inserts. I just got some food from the dollar store, I heard that didn't really matter a whole lot. As for the water change, the guy at Walmart told me that fish tanks are a self sustaining bio-system. I'm relatively new to all this but he explained as long as you keep your water clean using the filters and fill up the aquarium periodically when the water starts evaporating it should be fine. I sense you're going to call the bullshit card on this one lol.
When the fish died it was discoloured as in the photo. Its kind of hard to see but one of the sidefins was also black. To be honest and I feel horrible about this, the fish wasn't dead. I came home, he was on his side, not visibly breathing, not swimming etc. He didn't even flop around or move in the net but when i put him in the toilet he swam down the pipe!! Grr...
Anyways, thanks for your knowledge. I may have screwed up this one but at least you can help me from doing in the future!
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Technically fish tanks are a self sustaining system, its just that some are more self sustaining than others. One needs to change some of the water every couple of weeks (take out say 25%, then replace it with water that has had dechlorinater added to it to remove the chlorine. You wash the sponges inside the filter in the old water to get rid of the gunge that accumulates, but only in old water, or you will kill all the nice bacteria living in it). Rain water is good to top up a fish tank, i take mine out my waterbutt.
Personally i believe fish food matters alot. The problem with fish is that they are considered part of the proverbial furniture, joe public doesn't have a high perception of them, so there is a large mythos surrounding what one can do with them. Would you feed a dog anything but the best food you could buy it? Thats the philosphy i take.
Definatly check out your local shop, go during the week and have a chat with someone there, you'll often be suprised how much you can gleam from a face to face chat!
Everyone has fish die on them, i can't remember how many i've lost, its unfortunatly a part of the learning curve for most of us. The fact your taking active steps to not do it again is excellent!
It sounds like the fish has suffered some sort of water problem, so change some of the water and come back to us in a week and tell us how things are going! Get the guys at the fish store to go over everything again, just to make sure you've got the right ideas (apparently i havn't been making myself completly 100% super duper crystal clear these last few days according to the mrs
).