Ever feel like you have a cursed tank?
I put together this little 6g cube a while back. It was intended to be sort of iwagumi-ish. Substrate is fluval stratum, plants are a mix of dwarf chain swords and glossostigma. Tried co2 but that caused other issues. The main thing:
I’ve lost 10 fish to this thing (not all at once). I started with 20 neocaridina which all died overnight. Water parameters normal. A bit later I added 3 male guppies, which turned to 1 over about three weeks. Water parameters were fine, ph maybe a bit low, but nitrates/nitrites/ammonia were all basically zero unless i added fertilizer. Nobody appeared sick. I added three more guppies. The four were good for a while. Maybe six months. Then they slowly dropped. I would find them in the morning dead. When I lost the last one (which happened to be from the first lot) I figured maybe it was genetics or something. I added the glossotigma, upgraded to a canister filter, cycled the tank for a while while feeding it ammonia. Once everything seemed ok, I introduced a couple otocinclus ( I was having a bit of an algae issue) and four black emerald tetras. I lost one of the otos pretty quickly. These guys were all good for a few months. Yesterday’s my kid decided to dump half a container of bug bites into the tank while I was asleep. I emergency suctioned everything out that I could get and did about a 75-80% water change. I came home a few minutes ago from being out and found three tetras floating. I mildly panicked and relocated the last one (who appeared to be struggling) to another tank along with my last otocinclus.
I’m done with this setup. Tearing the thing apart soon and I’ll see if I can make it a more standard planted tank for a betta or something. It’s just really disheartening.
Edit: my other two tanks are running perfectly fine somehow. It really is just this cube
Edit #2: I just discovered somehow my little CO2 cylinder had gotten turned on and was way too fast. probably what got the tetras.