Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

We had our systems running for about two months with a handful of goldfish before getting our catfish. The ammonia spiked and we've lost about 10 out of 71 fish (one of those jumped out). The nitrite also started spiking earlier this week and I think that may have been causing more problems because most of the deaths were out of the two tanks with the highest nitrite concentrations rather than in the two with the highest ammonia concentrations.

At any rate, all that is way down. In the safe zone for most of the tanks and testing just a little elevated in the one that had deadly levels three days ago.

My question is how quickly do fish recover from that kind of stress? Should I expect to lose a couple more fish even though the levels are now good or are my survivors troopers and will just be extra happy to finally be able to breathe?

Have you salted your system? I had embarrassingly high nitrites when I introduced fish, I salted to 1ppt and did weekly water changes, all fish doing swimmingly. Two and a half months later system has finally cycled and I can put the sea salt back in the pantry

Cool! I just salted it this morning, but not for that reason. I just figured that so long as the fish were stressed, I may as well give them something to give them a little help. Nice to know it may have other beneficial effects!

Oxygenating the water will help (fish and bacteria). I would have changed water (30% to 50%) then salted...

I did a 20% water change which I think helped a great deal. My numbers have stayed stable since then so I think the system is finally stabilizing. I've lost a couple fish since then. One had one gill hemmorhage and it lasted just long enough that I was starting to wonder if it might recover, but it finally died.

It's weird. I have five tanks. One has been set up twice as long as the others and its numbers were the worst but we didn't lose any fish out of it. The other four have been treated pretty much the same, but we lost most of the fish out of two tanks and even though everything looks good, the fish are still pale in those tanks and don't eat nearly as well.

Wondering if there is something else going on I can't measure.

Salting and catfish is a delicate business as far as I can tell.

Do a lot of searches.