OK, after the catastrophe of losing so many babies last week I starved them for the best part of a day and then gave them Hikari Gold Floating Baby Pellets. Some fish are still spitting them out, so I pinch in a little bit of Aqua One Cichlid flakes..being careful not to overfeed them..or underfeed them...that is really hard when you have been feeding them HEAPS of bloodworms and having them devoured in seconds.

Anyway, yesterday I lost 5 fish...overnight I lost another 6...all from the tiger tank that survived the mass death. They randomly seem to start floating aimlessly until they stop moving all together and die. They do not gasp, they are not bloated, they just go belly up and no matter what I do, or where I put them...they die within a few hours of floating.

It is not water quality..my filters are not cycled yet but with my daily water changes all of my readings are back to zero, pH 7.2, temp 24 degrees. Water changes with Prime at the same temperature and they have had water changes every day of their life without a problem. Tanks no longer smell, all waste vacuumed up..but I can tell you that there is nowhere near the amount of poo that I had when I had them on bloodworms...which makes sense because I was giving them 8 trays a day and now they have no more than a few teaspoons of pellets.

I don't know if they are starving, I don't know if after being raised on nothing but brine shrimp bloodworms if I have stunted their digestive ability, I don't know if the pellets are expanding in their stomachs, I don't know if they are just dying from the shock of a food change...basically I don't know!! But I don't want to keep losing 10 fish a day. Should I just bite the bullet and put them back on blood worms..I was not losing ANY fish when I gave them bloodworms. The diet change has been a disaster.

Thanks Shaz

my question is "from the time you starve them, did you lost any? or only after
feeding????? from the other thread, you ask me "if good feeding is also bad"?
yes it is...for the fries...

if i may suggest, raise the discharge of your filter a little bit to create
aeration in your tank.... swimming against the current flow avoid cardiac
arrest among the fish....

I noticed you were on and hoped you'd see the post Paul. I can't connect the dots to eating or not eating. Because there are so many, I cannot track the eating of individuals...but my gut is telling me that they are not eating the pellets and are just starving to death. They are not bloated like the white ones were when they died and the white ones died QUICKLY, these ones go on for hours just floating in the flow.

Re the discharge..not a problem. In both tanks I now have a 1500 intank pushing water from the outlet side back up to the inlet side and a small intank directed at the inlet so that there is a good circular flow in the tank and the external filters are maximised. There is also a bubble stone and 2 sponge filters. AGHH I DON'T KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON...WHY DID I TAKE THEM OFF BLOODWORMS!!!!!!!

actually, i don't have any scientifc explanation about it either....
when i was a boy, my father used to tell me, don't feed yet the fingerling
section... they will die....then one time, i feel sorry for the begging fries,
pour the required dosage of foods.... and BOOM, 5 hours later, all fries were
floating and dead.... until now, i dodn't have the reason why? my father is
gone and he was a NO READ, NO WRITE man... (illiterate)...

from thereon, i always follows his instruction and we never lost another
batch of fries... oand more thing, we never fed the fries unless new water
from the ocean had been spiiled-in over the spillway... that process, now i
understand, is what we called water change..LOL

with regards to starving or not... what i mean was that during the time
you didn't feed them, did you lost any?

PAUL wrote:


No, none died when I was starving them, they only started to die yesterday after I started feeding them again. That is what is bugging me, I can't make sense of it. Thanx. Shaz

Help Guys, they r still dying..have lost 3 today....

Honey I read this thread about an hour ago... And I had to think about it...

My gut tells me you should go back to bloodworms... Something is not working with the pellets...

I also think you need to get your water under control... Because that is not helping anything. And often water quality issues take their toll in time.. So the repercussions could just start showing themselves now...

Barrow media, buy it from a LFS, Shit steal it... But the water issues aren't helping.

But IMO I would go back to Bloodworm..

Nicki--Sue wrote:


OK, I can swap some media from the grown ups tank...but yesterdays and todays tests with my API kit came up zero...I know that it is not because my tank is cycled..it is because I am doing daily water changes and getting rid of all the waste out of the tank within an hour of them doing it. Yep, I know that there would be 300 fish still alive if I didn't take them off bloodworms. I'll wait until tomorrow so that they have passed all the pellets and then I will give them bloodworms.

But what worries me about that is what if they are dying from starvation?

I just wish I knew what they were dying from. I might disect the next victim and see if he has too much in his gut or no food at all.

Whatever the case, if God trusts me enough to give me another batch of Oscars hatching, the little buggers can have bloodworms morning noon and night until they leave my home........

I know you are doing the absolute BEST you can for them! And as I told you earlier, My hat is off to you! You have done a wonderful job.

Any and all of us have made mistakes, and we have all learned.

BUT I can promise you with the cost involved in this "project" you have going, We all would have gone to pellets...

All you can do is try, and all you can do is learn! And we are all learning right along with you!

Nicki--Sue wrote:


Thanks Nicki Sue...I can feel you right with me here...I have just done todays pwc, but while I had the syphon in it I filled the API tubes and ran the test...I needn't have done a water change..it was zero to everything...and they just are not pooing much. Maybe they have been used to the water content of real food and the pellets are constipating them...I dunno. Have just found a scalpel and awaiting the next one to stop it's pathetic little death swim before I check out it's digestive tract. Will keep you posted...and I really and truelly appreciate your support...nice avatar pic by the way..Shaz xx

OK, have been on the net doing some research...the kids are building a cubby house in their room with blankets so it is quiet here..washing can wait.

The biggest clue in all of this I think is the aimless floating around...that is swim bladder malfunction and that can be caused by a full gut putting pressure on the swim bladder. I have a few floating or laying on the bottom, but not dead yet, so I haven't done my autopsy on a tiger. I put the dead white ones in the freezer last week because I didn't know what to do with them. I took a few out and cut them open...it was not pretty. They had a huge ball of bloodworms in their stomach, but in the tube between the stomach and the poo hole the pellets were all compacted. I think the answer is that I am still feeding them too much and the pellets don't pass through them as fast as the bloodworms. I put in a few peas and I am not giving them anymore food until tomorrow and see what happens. Then I will only feed them once or twice a day.

Sound like a plan?

hey sharyn,
just a question, what size pellets are you using? maybe the pellets are still too big for them once they have inflated with water? you could try using a motar and pestle to grind them up a tiny bit more and soaking the smaller peices for a minute or two before feeding it to them. just a suggestion