It’s been nearly a year and a half that I got back into aquatics and many will remember that I had close to a dozen fish tanks.
Well, I decide to consolidate them to bigger fish tanks and now I am down to two. Just my main Amazon Forest Tank and my Cichlid tank. I recently sold my orandas from my oranda tank, which I loved but I’ll get into that in a moment.
So, I had a flourishing system. Many remember I was breeding black moscow guppies, platys, mollys and even had a beta collection which I was monitoring heavily.
All was going well for nearly a year and something happened, which I thought I was well prepared for but obviously didn’t prepare as much as I should have and that is power outages. But my main circuit breaker in my electrical panel was going bad.
Starting in December, I knew something bad was happening as I started to get power fluctuations at home and constant power outages. I started to invest battery backups and USB-powered devices for backup oxygen for my fish.
While I was able to get the electrical panel fixed and felt I had a good number of things, I had as backup, unfortunately, there was a neighborhood power outage in the summer that lasted for seven hours and I wasn’t home at the time and unfortunately, our temperatures get quite hot over 110 degrees, in my part of California.
I lost nearly every fish that I had. Orandas were fine. Betas were fine. Gouramis were fine. Cichlid tank were running on one backup oxygen and fortunately, I had a high capacity power bank.
In my other tanks, it wasn’t pretty. Once I discovered the problem, many were floating or trying to gasp for air, I immediately started to divert most of my oxygen and battery backups towards the largest tank.
And while I was able to rescue numerous fish, many died days later. All of the corydoras survived. The pleco survived. The black moscows, I thought would survive. Unfortunately, they didn’t.
I think what was the hardest thing was seeing my favorite large angelfish dead, all tetras, platys, mollys and the black moscows dead. I guess part of me was hoping that with the tanks having
It was too hot and lack of oxygen for hours, I lost nearly 80 fish that day.
What amazingly survived, despite the tragic circumstance surrounding my fish were baby guppies and platys that were way in the bottom.
While the power came on, I lost too much fish that day. Fish I loved, fish I spent good money on and it was a blow.
But that was not the end of the tragedy.
While I had over a dozen fish still left, and not knowing how many fry survived. My heavily planted tank started to go through something I never expected.
I was taking care of these plants with nutrients, CO2 you name it and making them thrive for nearly a year. But then days later, I started noticing my floating plants disappearing. What was happening?
Did the lack of oxygen also get to the plants to the aquarium? It was the most unusual thing to see, all plants were getting dissolved and I knew right then and there, there would be nothing but death in this tank and I need to temporarily take out any surviving fish and put them in temporary tanks. Redo the largest tank and clean up as much as I can, because there could be dead plants and fish.
It was not a good sight at all. I lost my fish, I lost my plants and it was bad. In fact, I noticed that the dead plant life was starting to kill the surviving fish a day or two later. I thought I was lucky to have zebra and giant danios survive, along with maybe one or two lamp tetras but they all succumbed except the glofish tetras.
But while I was worried about that, then I had to check out the outdoor pond. Also, found koi and my large goldfish dead.
I was so deflated.
It was a catastrophic event which was nothing like I had before. I have suffered major loss with guppy communities suffering from rot and disease. But this was a loss, I never had in terms of fish/plant-life damage and financial loss.
After everything was setup, all that was left was my gouramis, cichlids and oranda, but also corydoras, pleco and maybe a two mollies, a few guppies, betas and very few platys, and fry.
I was bummed for months. In fact, aside from what I had left, I was thinking this was it. I’m done. I lost too much. Spent too much.
But months later, I started to miss the fish that I loved looking at, so I made the decision to sell my orandas. Orandas that I raised when they were small and were now big and plump and I was able to get good money for them. I also sold my pleco which was now a foot.
I used the money to purchase angel fish and high fin platys (Xiphophorus maculatus). I lost a lot of my high fins from the tragic
Several months later, I’m now down to two tanks….my large tank and my cichlid tank. Cichlids are doing fine.
As for the big tank, the tank is still dominated by high fin platys. Many of the fry have grown and it’s interesting to see because it shows me which parent they had. You see, most of my platys were white, all orange or all blue/silver. I had one that was all spotted and sure enough, the platy frys became all silver spotted, Mickey Mouse tail with an orange fin. What a trip!
As for angel fish, I miss my old ones but I ended up getting an albino angel fish and a calico one.
I no longer have a planted aquarium, most with plastic plants and as an experiment, trying out driftwood. But I have to say that while the driftwood is good for an aquarium, that tinge of yellow or brown from the tannins, sometimes bothers me. But for the most part, I can’t complain. I’m able to be happy with my fish again.
I have to admit that it’s not the same, as what I had before. I loved having a planted aquarium. But I can’t keep on spending money like I did and then suffer another loss.
I have better backup systems in place, in case of a blackout. Including a powered air pump that has a battery backup. So, if there is a power outage, the pump will still continue to produce oxygen. But even then, for a long hour, hot summer, there is only so much you can do if you are not home.
But that is the status of my fish nearly a year and half later.
