# Did Khuli Loach kill my Tetra?



## Chubbutt (Nov 26, 2017)

Hello,

Just joined up here to hopefullt get some answers as to whats been going on in my tank. For the last 9 months my 30L tank has had 3 neon tetras, 2 dwarf neon rainbow fish, 4 amano shrimp, one halequin tetra and two african frogs. About 2 months ago the frogs died about fours weeks apart. After that I gave the tank a thorough clean before I bought three khuli loaches. Not 24 hours later all my neon tetras were dead, the halequin is hiding behind a plant and the rainbow fish are just swimming around the top of the tank with their noses skimming the surface. The lady at the fish shop said that they should live together quite harmoniously, but on observation there's just been death and terror throughout the community.

Can someone please tell me what could've happened? And if I should take the loach back? 

Cheers


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## aussieJJDude (Jun 9, 2012)

What do you mean by cleaning? Sounds to me that you destroyed the beneficial bacteria in your tank, and they are suffering from ammonia.

I assume that its a 30 liter tank? I would suggest getting those fish out of that aquarium, its far too small for that amount of fish or the type of fish you want to keep - ideally your want to look for something that's at least 150L.

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk


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## RudeRubicante (Dec 29, 2016)

overstocked tank and by the sounds of it - you "cleaned" the good bacteria out which made the ammonia spike.

Invest in a much larger tank, those guys are cramped and a larger space means less concentration - easier parameters to control. 

As for the spiking - did you clean out the gravel too or in your cleaning did you just push it around? If you've never cleaned your gravel and it gets disrupted in cleaning the sides of your tank - it can result in an ammonia spike.


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## jaysee (Dec 9, 2009)

I’ve never known kuhli loaches to kill anything.

Like was mentioned, actually cleaning the tank is about the worst thing that you can do to your ecosystem. Gravel vacs, glass scraping and rinsing off the filter media every couple months is the extent an aquarium should ever be “cleaned”. Depending on your individual system, you might need to rinse the filter media once a month or only a couple times a year. If you’re needing to rinse the filter media, in order to restore water flow, more than once a month then you are either under filtered, over stocked, or over feeding, or any combination of the 3.


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