Retirement and forum shutdown (17 Jan 2022)
Hi,
John Howell who has managed the forum for years is getting on and wishes to retire from the role of managing it.
Over the years, he has managed the forum through good days and bad days and he has always been fair.
He has managed to bring his passion for fish keeping to the forum and keep it going for so long.
I wish to thank John for his hard work in keeping the forum going.
With John wishing to "retire" from the role of managing the forum and the forum receiving very little traffic, I think we must agree that forum has come to a natural conclusion and it's time to put it to rest.
I am proposing that the forum be made read-only from March 2022 onwards and that no new users or content be created. The website is still registered for several more years, so the content will still be accessible but no new topics or replies will be allowed.
If there is interest from the ITFS or other fish keeping clubs, we may redirect traffic to them or to a Facebook group but will not actively manage it.
I'd like to thank everyone over the years who helped with forum, posted a reply, started a new topic, ask a question and helped a newbie in fish keeping. And thank you to the sponsors who helped us along the away. Hopefully it made the hobby stronger.
I'd especially like to thank John Howell and Valerie Rousseau for all of their contributions, without them the forum would have never been has successful.
Thank you
Darragh Sherwin
Death of Ancistrinae sp.
This is filtered using a canaster filter conected to a under gravel filter. It was originally set up as a grow out thank for discus and is set up 18 months now.
Last week during routeine water changes i was gravel cleaning right down to the under gravel plate as i would normaly do.
The suction from the syphon did'nt seem to be great and i couldent find any fault so i carried on regardless.
After the greavel clean all the mulm and dirt seem to end up on top of the gravel so i taught i would leave this untill the following evening to syphon off.
The following morning when i was feeding the early risers and giving the nocternals there second feed i noticed one of the plecos swollen and verry much dead( Ahhhhh Noooooooo).
A quick check on the other plecos and all seemed fine except one that had a slightly swolen underside and the mouth was slightly contorted.
i checked the ph. fine, temp. fine. so i added an air pump and off to work i had to go.
Returning home the first thing was to test the water.
The Nitrates were unreadable. Infact it was 3 x 50% water changes later that i got a reading of 160 ppm(mg/l).
I also had 2 more casualties that i discovered when i emptied the tank.
You cant imagine how bad i felt.
This tank gets 2 x 10% water changes a week and the water parameters are always prity good.
I can only asume the disturbance of the undergravel plate caused this rediculess Nitrate reading.
It turned out that a leaf was cought in the syphon tube restricting the flow.
Please Log in to join the conversation.
