Every Fish I Put In Dies But All My Shrimp Are Fine

Miller535

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Just so OP can rule this out, it would take a miracle from god to have a tank setup in December be uncycled while also supporting life such as shrimps or CUC.
I don't know that that is true. A couple of shrimps (especially in 75 gallons) put off little to no ammonia. For this very reason many a many of reefers have had things like ich, let their tanks go fallow, then had some ammonia issues if they tried to just dump all of their fish in after the fallow period.

Assume nothing. Especially since the OP has yet to say what he has in his clean up crew other then shrimp. And has yet to say what kind of fish. If he was putting super hardy fish like clown fish and damsels in and they are dying in 24 hours, then I would be more likely to be persuaded to a disease. As both of those fish can generally live through a cycle.
 

NatureHold

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Can OP post water parameters just for discussion's sake? All too often we see "my tank's parameters are fine", but when posted for discussion, open the door to other possibilities.
 

Azedenkae

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I don't know that that is true. A couple of shrimps (especially in 75 gallons) put off little to no ammonia. For this very reason many a many of reefers have had things like ich, let their tanks go fallow, then had some ammonia issues if they tried to just dump all of their fish in after the fallow period. Assume nothing.
I think it is true. If the aquarium is uncycled, then even with a lower amount of ammonia produced it will still build up over the month or two and the inverts probably would be affected.

Additionally, it is not like op is dumping all of their fish in at once, that is also a very different scenario.

Even if uncycled, a fish or two won't produce so much ammonia that the next day they die. Also because if enough ammonia is produced to kill the fish in a day, I'd have think the inverts would be adversely affected too.

So yeah, based on the information provided it was quite simple to rule out an uncycled tank as the likely cause of the deaths.
 

brandon429

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I think this issue best summarizes the state of the hobby in fish keeping. It would be handled different ways depending on which forum gets the post (fish disease vs chemical contaminant in some threads vs immune boosting methods in others) and with all the varying evals we get to watch live time evolution of practice.


If we had to rely on peer reviewed papers for the evolution of reefing it would be so slow to evolve I'd be more entertained by cold molasses.

Each evaluation and treatment perspective no matter how opposing is made up of wins from both sides from web posts it seems. It's fascinating to aim for highest retention rate then test that out a few years, we have logs of data from each method to scan for patterns the last five years. best practices Tbd
 
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Miller535

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I think it is true. If the aquarium is uncycled, then even with a lower amount of ammonia produced it will still build up over the month or two and the inverts probably would be affected.

Additionally, it is not like op is dumping all of their fish in at once, that is also a very different scenario.

Even if uncycled, a fish or two won't produce so much ammonia that the next day they die. Also because if enough ammonia is produced to kill the fish in a day, I'd have think the inverts would be adversely affected too.

So yeah, based on the information provided it was quite simple to rule out an uncycled tank as the likely cause of the deaths.
2 Shrimp and probably a few snails could totally live in a un-cycled tank for a few months, especially if they did any water changes.

But my point really was that we don't know what the op did fish was. Did they go buy 5 fish and dump them all in at one time? We don't know. Did they only buy fish that typically need more mature tanks? we don't know. Lots of assumptions with little to no info. That was really my point.
 

Azedenkae

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2 Shrimp and probably a few snails could totally live in a un-cycled tank for a few months, especially if they did any water changes.

But my point really was that we don't know what the op did fish was. Did they go buy 5 fish and dump them all in at one time? We don't know. Did they only buy fish that typically need more mature tanks? we don't know. Lots of assumptions with little to no info. That was really my point.
The point that we are driving in is that there was enough information. Little to no info would be 'There are inverts. I added fish. The fish died." There was enough info here to draw out a timeline that allows one to infer enough to rule out scenarios like an uncycled tank. The info provided include that the tank has been up for a while, inverts have been alive for a long time, fish introduced died very quickly, and that the inverts were not affected by the fish deaths.

While I do agree that more information would be much appreciated, and in a lot of other threads more information is indeed necessary, that is not the case with this particular thread.
 

ApoIsland

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The tank was fully cycled until we had our mass die-off. The shrimp and stuff are still in there, so it wouldn't completely uncycle, there is a possibility that our capacity of the bacteria is not enough, but we only added two fish this time. We waited about a month since the last fish was in the tank. They really didn't even have a chance to affect the bioload, as one of them died within hours. The other one was a sharknose goby, which is tiny. I wouldn't think adding two fish, one being less than an inch long would be killed off.
To me it does not sound like a parasite. While a parasite can kill in a day I believe it usually takes longer. And definitely longer than a few hours. Seems like from the OP they are all dying within a day repeatedly with multiple fish. I'm guessing some kind of toxicity.

You should be able to get a 5g bucket and mix up some fresh salt water, oxygenate it and then drop a fish in and keep it alive for days with nothing else in the bucket except a heater and airstone. Maybe try that and if it is another failure you know its something with the water you make.
 

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I'll toss in the obligatory, "Have you checked for stray voltage?" comment. Granted, I've never had a stray voltage situation, but I have ready about other tanks and having the voltage do strange things. It's unlikely, IMO, but it's a possible cause to rule out. Fairly simple to do with a multimeter, look it up on Google.
 

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