Stressed discus

Well it has been 4 days now since I have changed the substrate in the discus tank. One of our wild caught discus is looking very stressed and not well He is really dark in color and he still has all his fins really clamped. Earlier today he was resting at the bottom not moving much, but now he is at least in the open floating mid tank. The ammonia levels are down, but the nitrites are still about 0.8ppm. I did another water change today and put more salt and some melafix in. I am hoping this will help them through this. They all look a little stressed but a few of them look much better today than they did. I hope the nitrites go down soon, or I might lose more fish. I hate nitrite spikes, we already went through this a month or more ago. Is there anything else I can do for them? I know the salt helps to detoxify the nitrites, and it will also help to sterilize any wounds they get while they are in this condition. I will be doing 25% water changes every day until they go down as well.

i think ur doing a fine job, mabey try some stress coat, helps keep em slimy!

Yeah I put some cycle in too. So far no more deaths, but I really need to get the nitrites back down before they do some serious damage. All the discus still look stressed today. Time for another water change for them tonight My other pair of kribensis seem like they want to breed though lol. It seems some fish are happy and some are in rough shape. It almost looked like my blue acaras were getting ich, along with a couple of others. They had some white spots all over their body and fins. So I did put some melafix in to help with healing any open sores some might have, and the salt to help with things as well. The temperature is already at 84 so that should run their life cycle fast if it happens to be ich. Today they seem to not be so bad, which is a good sign. I will do another WC then add more salt, cycle, melafix and water conditioners. I really wish at this time I had my RO system hooked up, but I have to wait for my dad to get back and install it for me, which they are out of town until the first week of May

At least 5 out of our 7 discus look quite a bit better since the water change this evening. But 2 of them are definitely not out of the woods yet. Not to mention the wonderful ich outbreak Most of the fish have it, and I hope it goes away soon. There is not much worse than high nitrites and an ich problem at the same time. My male Krib looked not well near the top of the tank, so I stuck him in the 25 gallon fry tank for now. If he were to eat the babies, oh well, he is more important to me than they are. I hope we can overcome this battle without too many losses. I don't think I could have gotten the 10 gallon at a better time.

As you can see the discus in the middle is very stressed. He used to never be that dark, and the other 2 seem to be doing fine.



And in this one are 2 of the others who are slightly stressed from everything



I have noticed that the others that are not as sick almost take care of the sick ones. They mostly stay by their side, it is kind of cute actually!!

what did you change?

I changed the substrate and that's it. It screwed everything up biologically. I am so mad about it!!

what did you change it to?

looks like palyground sand to me

Yes we bought some bags of play sand. I tried rinsing it well but the darn stuff still messed up the water badly. And I think with putting alot of fresh tap water and having to rinse all the filter media out many times because of the sand, and with new substrate, the tank had to almost cycle again. They are looking a little better this evening, and earlier I put some Nox-Ich containing malachite green in the tank to help with the ich. If it kills the ghost shrimp oh well, we can always buy more. I would rather save the things that matter.