[SpottedPleco]

Off the bat:
pH-7.8-7.9
Ammonia-0
Nitrites-0
Nitrates-0ppm
Temp-76-78F
Tank Size- 20gal

Plants: 3 Amazon Swords, and 2 Anubias Nanas
Stock: 5 Neon Tetras, 3 Otos, 1 hi-fin skirt tetra, and up until today, 1 Dwarf Gourami.

So, my dwarf gourami had been living in this tank with this setup for about 14 months now and I thought he had been doing very well. His colors had been very vibrant, externally looked extremely healthy. This afternoon he simply...stopped living? I had just seen the tank with everyone alive and nothing out of the ordinary, took a brief nap (45-60min?) and when I woke up, my dwarf gourami was dead at the bottom of the tank.

There were no signs of trauma or disease on the corpse, his eyes weren't cloudy or glazed, it literally looked like he was just playing a highly competitive game of freeze tag with his tankmates.


Recent changes to the tank which may provide some clues(?);


About 1 month ago, I replaced the light bulb in the tank with one of those bulbs for vivid colors, as the bulb I had in there had died, and began experiencing a rather rampant algae bloom; to compensate I reduced algae wafer feedings to my Otos. There has since been a fairly constant steady growth of algae, but my Otos have never been happier and have been keeping the tank looking on the messy side, but in check.

Last week I set up a betta tank on my desk, and moved an amazon sword plant from this tank to the new one.


Has anyone else had a fish simply stop living like this before? I have literally never seen anything like it.

 

[jaysee]

yeah, that can happen sometimes. There are so many things that can go wrong internally that we just can't determine.

One time I was at the fish store looking at a tank of tetras. In such a situation, I will watch the tank and pick out the fish I DON'T want, since that is far easier than keeping track of fish I do want. So I watched the tank for about 20 minutes and couldn't find a single fish I didn't like. I called the girl over to net me some fish, and as soon as the net was in the tank, one of them just died. Just like that. I spent 20 minutes examining these fish and couldn't find anything wrong with any of them, and yet this fish died instantly right before our eyes. Heart attack? Brain aneurism? who knows. These things just happen.

 

[SpottedPleco]

Thanks for the reply Jaysee.

Yeah.... It's a bummer, he was definitely one of my favorites in the tank =/