Feel Like Giving Up

I'm so disillusioned, I wanted to keep fish as I had no real hobby and thought it would be enjoyable and relaxing but is proving to be really upsetting and stressful 

I have tried to do everything right, I cycled my tank, didn't overstock, sought advice, did lots of water changes and repeated this when I got a bigger tank but everything seems to be going wrong.

First I got a major white spot outbreak and lost 9 Cardinals, 2 Electric Blue Rams and 1 Dwarf Rainbow. After treatment I moved the remaining 5 Neons and 2 Ottos to a new 180L well planted tank along with some new Glowlight Tetras. Everything was fine and so I replaced the 9 Cardinals and all seemed good until two days ago I noticed a Cardinal was missing and I couldn't find it anywhere. Last night I came home and found a Rainbow gasping at the surface even though all the other fish were seemingly ok. It died as I watched and I immediately removed it. I tested the water and Ammo, Nitrites, Nitrates and PH were all spot on.

This morning I got up for work and found all of the fish except the Ottos sitting on the bottom hardly moving. The tetras had lost a lot of colour and none of them stirred even when I put the light on. I was struggling for time but managed to do a 50% water change which seemed to perk them up and left for work fearing the worse. I was happily suprised to return and find all fish seemingly doing well and water tests still fine.

But then from nowhere the 'missing' cardinal returned, dead as a Dodo and completely covered in a fluffy fungus. When I say covered, it was completely cocooned , hardly visible in the mass. I am so scared they have all caught something and will be heading the same way before I can see my LFS tomorrow. I'm really starting to wonder if I have made a big mistake. 

Thanks for reply yet again Sue.. I swear this site would die without you 

The 9 Cardinals and two Otto's were added to the remaining 5 Rainbows and resident Glowlight tetras. They and all the others seem to be doing really well although one Otto has gone 'missing'

LFS said that the fungus was a result of the Cardinal death and not a cause. They tested my water in case I had got it wrong but they said it was 'perfect'

I so want to be good at this, it is so hard to take all the setbacks for the poor fish 

Like brecon, I too learned the hard way about the need for a quarantine tank. But even with that, I have on occassions moved the fish into the main tank too quickly and introduced disease into the main tank. I have a plain basic 25 litre tank as my quarantine tank, though at the moment it has my baby cherry shrimp in.
Twice over the last 17 years I have got up in a morning to find every fish lying dead on the bottom. That's every single fish, nothing left alive. The second time was 2003 (it was the day the men came to fit the double glazing, that's how I remember) which was before I used the internet. I hadn't a clue on either occassion what had happened, though I have my suspicions now - and it was my fault. Each time, I removed the dead fish, did a water change and got more fish.
I was pretty lazy back then about water changes, sometimes I'd go a month between them, and I was also overstocked.  Lots of fish make lots of ammonia which the filter bacteria turn into lots of nitrate. Nitrate is acidic and if the water has very little carbonate it soon gets used up leaving nothing to buffer the water against pH changes. I now know that I have very little carbonate in my tapwater. I strongly suspect that that my fish died from a sudden dramatic pH crash. My fault through overstocking and not doing enough water changes.

Fish do go white and fuzzy quite quickly after death if you don't find them. But finding them isn't always easy. I can only count 10 ember tetras and there should be 11. I didn't find it during the last water change but with shrimps, snails and loaches, the body of a fish as small as an ember tetra probably wouldn't last long enough to get fungused. And the reason I think it has died is my fault again. I sucked an ember tetra up at the previous water change. It looked OK when I removed it from the bucket, but it could have had internal damage. There are some fish that find the siphon tube irrestistible and it's always a problem trying to avoid them.



It is easy for things to go wrong quickly in an environment like a fish tank. We've all had problems with our tanks especially at the beginning, and fish do die. Don't beat yourself up over this, learn from it.