Hi – I’m new to keeping a fish (got left one I was forced to keep). I have gravel on the bottom and added several root tabs today because the plants kept rotting and dying. I just did a big water change because the water was turning really yellow and now it looks even worse, yellow and super cloudy. I just want to know if I should take the fish out to make sure she doesn’t die. Is it just bacteria disturbed from the bottom when I changed the water? Or too much nutrients from the root tabs? Or ammonia from the dying plants? I wasn’t left with any test kits so I can’t test the water. Please help, TIA 🙏
https://i.redd.it/l9hec8okv0hg1.jpeg
Posted by fudges_
3 Comments
You are going to have to purchase a test kit and provide water parameters for anyone to help. API master test kit is recommended
Definitely order a test kit asap! You can 100% make the tank unsafe for your fish if you used “several”. How many is several? You could probably do just a couple since you don’t have a ton of plants and just right near where the plant is. Is there soil substrate under the gravel? You may need to create a hospital tanks for your fishy and do a few changes to get that out. Depending on the amount, you could have spiked ammonia and a lot of other things.
Without being able to test the water, it’s all guesswork. How many tabs did you add? How old is the tank? Without testing, we didn’t know if the nitrogen cycle is established and the water could be rich in toxic ammonia (would also damage the plants).
At minimum perform water changes to try to dilute in case of ammonia, nitrite or nitrate build up. We can’t really guide more than that as the tank is a total unknown.