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Hi Philosophos,
I suspect the problem lies with the feeding. What kind of food do you give your fishes? Meaty/high protein foods?
cheers,
I've had regular surface scum before. The oily, semi-translucent white tinged stuff that you can drag a paper towel over. This doesn't bother me any. What I have now looks like a white wrinkled sheet of tissue paper, and it comes back 3-4x a day after being skimmed off. It started after adding some pencil fish, though the bioload shouldn't have changed much, since the same number of male guppies at the same size were removed at the same time. Besides that, a pair of apisto's went in after the problem had already started. Dosing is all pretty standard EI stuff, water is RO. Any ideas?
-Philosophos
Hi Philosophos,
I suspect the problem lies with the feeding. What kind of food do you give your fishes? Meaty/high protein foods?
cheers,
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination
Now that the A. hongsoi are in, yes. Not when it started though.
The problem seems to have cleared for now with this last water change. Thinking about how fast it came on, I'm guessing it's a certain stress coat product that I suspect the store uses. They get very large quantities of it, and it's meant for ponds. I think may react badly to acidic pH, which would've gone relatively unnoticed since the water here is very high pH, and compressed CO2, RO, etc. isn't used much. I should ask for a bit next time I'm there, just to test it.
-Philosophos
guppies do eat the protein film form on the surface!
Ya, I left for a couple days and it seems the pencil fish took care of the remainder that re-formed after the water change; ate it all. Not feeding probably lowered the proteins, phospholipids etc. floating around as well. I'm still wondering how it came on in 1-2 days and disappeared with one water change and a couple days of not feeding. The film looked too serious to go away so easily.
-Philosophos
Try balloon mollies!!
I suspect it has to do with the type of food you feed. I was using Tetra flakes and there was nothing, but when I swapped over to Ocean Nutrition, I got the protein film.
Bought some guppies to deal with the film and it works.
It's a logical enough theory, but in practice it hasn't matched up. Flake and dried cyclops have caused it, just as the blackworms have. Water changes on this tank are on a 30%2x/wk EI schedule (when I'm not slacking).
Interesting note though; it's gone away since the HC has been replanted. There was a heavy layer of detritus under it due to issues with rooting. The HC was essentially just anchored to rock wool points and holding together in a mesh, without actually taking to the substrate. The film happened most frequently after a water change, which disturbed the HC and probably blew around some detritus. I'm guessing it had a high protein content due to escaped blackworms before my fiance figured out how to stop them from getting in to the substrate.
-Philosophos
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