Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi all, I have 30 goldfish in my fish tank that has been running for close to two months now, but my fish are suffering a lot, some have ich, some have fin rot, and I have noticed that their feces floats and is much thicker than I would imagine they should be. The feces is brown and now sticks to the edges of the barrel at the water level. They look almost like worms, honestly quite disgusting.

I have no idea if this is normal feces. I have salted the system for two weeks and the plants suffered greatly. I over salted to about 9 ppt. Today I made an 80 water change to the system.

But I am mainly concerned about the feces, does this sound normal?

Thanks in advance to anyone who has any advice.

Sincerely,

Karim

What kind and how much of bio filtration are you using? Pictures?

No bio filtration at all. Unless you count the media beds. I have three media beds made up of old bathtubs. I am using a sort of porous volcanic rock as the media, and I have about twenty small plants in there that aren't really growing.

That is bio filtration. How is the water exiting your fish tank? Do you have enough flow to wash out the feces? Do you have any pictures?

I am turning over the water around twice an hour, and the water leaves the tank through a pipe that has holes all over it almost the entire height of the fish tank. Also I have an overflow so there is a reasonable amount of water going back into the sump tank.

No pictures on this computer, but I will try to upload some as soon as I get a chance.

My fish look a lot healthier these days, but I am still getting this strange looking feces. I now have to clean this slimey brown rim of feces from the fish tank at the water level. Anyone else have such stains in their fish tank?

That is not from feces, it is bioslime and a normal healthy part of an AP ststem.