Fish difficulty breathing after adding UV sterilizer

[bouttreepriddy]

Examples of the heavy breathing. Rock Beauty is now lying on side.

 

[bouttreepriddy]

For now I’m planning on turning the air pump up and leaving the tank overnight. It looks like copper right after chloroquine or redosing chloroquine might create additional problems.

 

[Jay Hemdal Verified Community Expert]

I tried to keep the concentration at just under 15 mg/L (around 16 gallon volume in quarantine and dosed like 15 gallons). I did a daily water change of 30% replacing with the same concentration (adding 285 mg chloroquine to 5 gallons of water).

Sorry - but the RB likely didn’t survive the night.

That chloroquine dose should have been ok. And you’ve been monitoring ammonia?

I don’t have a clear direction for you to go here - it seems too fast for any disease issue to rebound after chloroquine, but maybe it wasn’t fully clearing the disease during treatment? I guess I’d do a big water change and start copper up - get it to 2.25 ppm in 12 hours.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

- Maybe the uv sterilizer or new tubing is leaching into the water?

On that specific point, which UV and tubing?

Some have noted tin release the green killing machine, and that tin may have caused an invert die off that started a bad cascade of events.

 

[bouttreepriddy]

Sorry - but the RB likely didn’t survive the night.

That chloroquine dose should have been ok. And you’ve been monitoring ammonia?

I don’t have a clear direction for you to go here - it seems too fast for any disease issue to rebound after chloroquine, but maybe it wasn’t fully clearing the disease during treatment? I guess I’d do a big water change and start copper up - get it to 2.25 ppm in 12 hours.

Rock Beauty is still in the same condition as last night (not looking good but not gone yet).

Good call on the ammonia. I had been using ammonia alert badges which looked fine but I tried retesting with test strips and it was unfortunately at a toxic level with the strip. I'm not sure how that much more ammonia showed up then what was happening in my uncycled quarantine. I tried to get the cycle started for observation with Fritz turbostart and did reduce my water changes to every other day which was likely a mistake in a tank this small.

I am going to try a 100% water change for now and then figure out how to treat.

 

[bouttreepriddy]

On that specific point, which UV and tubing?

Some have noted tin release the green killing machine, and that tin may have caused an invert die off that started a bad cascade of events.

It's the Pond Pro UV110 Advantage with 1.5" flexible pvc for connections. I saw some other threads with people using it and it was much cheaper than a similarly sized UV.

 

[Aqua Ultraviolet]

Get carbon back in right now, keep the airstones blasting, pause the H2O2, and do as many 30-gallon water changes as you can manage

Most likely cause: plumbing the UV stirred up a load of old sump detritus. That dumps organics into the water, bacteria go to work, oxygen drops, and gills get irritated. Stopping carbon recently made it worse the H2O2 protocol specifically says keep carbon running the whole time because oxidation creates byproducts that need to be removed. New tubing or the UV itself can also leach a little if it wasn’t thoroughly rinsed first.

UV + H2O2 is actually recommended in the Humblefish protocol, so that combo itself is not the problem.

Do this now:

• Fresh carbon in high flow
• Multiple 30-gal water changes (one 10% change won’t dilute much on 300 gallons)
• Keep heavy aeration
• Stop H2O2 until the fish settle and carbon is working
• Test ammonia, nitrite, pH

Don’t pull all the fish into the 20-gal QT unless one is really crashing. Catching them adds more stress and the small tank will foul fast. Fix the main system first
Post an update after the first water change and carbon are in.