Survey: Whats the lifespan of your cardinals?

[ah tong]

Hello
Just wanna find out how long do your cardinals live? I recently found out my 3/4-1 inch cardinals dying while the other smaller ones are alright and swimming. Really heart pain, cos keep them for 8 months liao feed the bugger till big and fat. Is it better to buy smaller cardinals from LFS in future so that they live longer in you tanks?

[plantmania]

.... Cardinal tetra can live to around 4 years. Think there might be some problems with your tetras for them to die after only 8 months.

1)Maybe the exact age of the fishes you have is around there, 4 years old from fries to full adult....

2) overeating ????

3) Prolong exposure to certain addictive/metal/chemicals/chlorine ? 8 months worth of poisoning.... newer fish might not exhibit until lethal dosage is accumulated...

4) Bad luck ? PH crash ? Ammonia spike ? Internal blockage(E.g like heart attack, too much fat/food ) ?

More investigation into tank params might shine more light into it. Top priority is always the water quality, then followed by care of the aquarist. ( proper tank maintainence, avoid overfeeding , etc)

My thoughts

[juggler]

Really 4 years? Wow.

I left 5 Cardinals (from a batch of 30) which I got from Gan in Jan 2002. Still doing well. Sadly, most of them died during a disease outbreak a few months back. Hope to see these surviving 5 live longer.

[ah tong]

plantmania,
Thanks for the input, ok la, could be the new batch of neon tetras that were added last month. Cos they were the ones dying first followed by my fat cardinals.

Will check on my water quality too.

Hopefully its just old age of those cardinals, cos i bought them at a rather big size.