Emergency Help section

If you have sick fish, dying fish or a serious problem with your water, this is the section for you. If your fish are in a new tank (less than 3 months since you added your first fish) please see the Nitrogen Cycle section after reading this section. Also, read the euthanasia section if putting your fish out of its misery becomes necessary.

The first thing you should do when you have any concern that your tank is in trouble is a significant water change, of 30-50% of the water. Make sure you treat the new water with Amquel or Prime or some other de-chlorinator that eliminates ammonia from chloramines as well as the chlorine. Save enough water to run tests on your water parameters, and once you change the water, test the nitrite, nitrate, ammonia levels and the pH of the water you removed, NOT the tank water you just added fresh, treated water to. Not only will testing the water AFTER the water change give you diluted results, but dechlorinators have a habit of interfering with the indicators in certain test kits, making your test results inaccurate if you test the water after adding treated tap water to your tank. Clean out the filter, rinsing the filter media in removed water from the tank to ensure the water is being adequately filtered. If you have a hospital/quarantine tank available and empty of fish, isolate any fish that have visible symptoms there, leaving the fish that seem healthy in the permanent tank. To do this, you need to acclimate the fish from your main tank to the hospital tank water in the same way you acclimate new purchases to your home tank. Put them in a bag ½ full of tank water, float in the quarantine tank until the temperature of the water is equilibrated (30 minutes), and then add ½ cup of water from the tank to the bag every 15 minutes for an hour. Like fish store water, you don’t want to transfer diseased water to your hospital tank if you can help it, so try not to let any water from the bag into the hospital tank. If your fish will tolerate salt, such as mollies, guppies, tetras, goldfish, etc. add anywhere from 3-5 teaspoons of salt per 5 gallons of water in both the hospital tank and the main tank the fish were originally in. Make sure when you are done treating your fish, if you want to reduce the salt level, it is best to do so slowly. Fish are much better able to handle a sudden increase in salt level than a sudden decrease. Once the water changes and tests are done, you should contact expert help, such as a trustworthy fish store or good online newsgroup. Just beware of adding medications to your tanks without being sure of the disease your fish have, as often the medicines sold for fish are as harmful to the fish as the diseases themselves. Make sure you keep your fish that were sick in the quarantine tank for 1-2 weeks after they appear to have recovered before re-introducing them to the main tank, both to be sure that they are fully healed so as to avoid sickening the remaining fish, and to allow them time to recover from the stress before exposing them to the stress of transferring from one tank to another.