How do I keep my fish alive in my 14 gallon freshwater aquarium?
Posted on August 18th, 2009 by admin
Fish
I recently got a 14 gallon freshwater aquarium. After letting the tank filter out and reach 75 degrees (about 2 days), I started adding fish. I added about 9 fish in 2 days. They were all fine until about 2 days ago. They all died within 1 day of each other. This was about 3 weeks after I got the aquarium. How do I keep them alive? Also, what are some good fish to keep in it?
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I recently got a 14 gallon freshwater aquarium. After letting the tank filter out and reach 75 degrees (about 2 days), I started adding fish. I added about 9 fish in 2 days. They were all fine until about 2 days ago. They all died within 1 day of each other. This was about 3 weeks after I got the aquarium. How do I keep them alive? Also, what are some good fish to keep in it?
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Your tank has not yet cycled, which is why your fish all died suddenly. Your ammonia levels spiked, and fish cannot handle that.
You need to either do a fishless cycle (do a search, there are a multitude of ways that people suggest this be done), or you need to add 2 or 3 hardy fish (zebra danios, etc) to your tank and then let the tank cycle. You’ll need to do water changes throughout the cycle to minimize the stress on your danios, and you need a water test kit to keep tabs on the cycle.
Once the fish are in, you’ll see an ammonia spike, followed by a nitrite spike, and finally the nitrates will begin to show up on your test kit. Once the ammonia level and the nitrite level are BOTH at 0, you can begin to add other fish (slowly). One or two per week MAX.
Also, in a 14 gallon tank, you are not going to be able to fit a lot of fish. If you stick with small community fish like danios or guppies, you can have probably 6 or 7 fish in there. But that is about it. The rule of thumb is one inch (FULL GROWN) of fish per gallon. So a danio that gets to be about 2″ full grown, but is only an inch long now still counts as 2″!
Adding 9 fish in 2 days is a disaster, and there is no way they could survive it.
At this point, you need to clean the tank, do a 50% water change, get a test kit and see where your levels are. Then decide to either do the fishless cycle or the “normal” cycle – and start there.
Good luck!
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it must of been ur filter thats wat happend 2 me when i was little if not idk
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Depening on your fish stock, if they aren’t 1-2 inch tropical fish, you looking around 4 inches. Unless your looking to buy a bigger tank in the near future you need to stock your tank better.
What fish are in the tank?
Heater,filter?
25% water changes weekly?