Cant Keep Angelfish alive

Question
Hey Stephanie,

 My name is Michael, and Ive been having problems with keeping angelfish alive.  Ill start by saying that I have around 10 year with freshwater fish, and this bugging the heck out of me!!  Mybe two minds will fix this problem :).  

 It all stared when I sold my oscar.  I had him for around 3 1/2 to 4 years, and I wanted to go back with a community tank again.  The tank is a 55 gallon,lightly planted tank, with a PH of 7.8-7.9 stable, nitrates 10-15 ppm, nitrite and ammonia is at 0.  Hardness is 200 GH ppm, and alkalinity is around 300 KH ppm.  I have pretty hard water.  As of right now the tank has been running two months with out the oscar. And about 8 years before. I did two 100% water changes to make sure I started with a nitrate free start.  I cleaned the gravel until the water came out clear.  I ran the tank for a week with only a zebra pleco.  I was also putting "CYCLE" in the tank.  It helps cylce a tank faster, by putting a boost in the bacteria.  I never had an ammonia spike, and the water seemed to still have a great bio-filter going after all the cleaning.  I am still running one of the power filter, and a sponge filter in the tank.  The same ones that I used with the oscar.  I figured he was so messy that the bio filter was full enough to keep the new tank going great.  After 2 weeks I put a school of 5 lemon tetras in the tank.  They did great, so I went back and got a school of 8 harlequin Rrsbora.  So far I have yet to loose any of them.  So after a week or so I thought I would try some angels.  This is were the I went wrong.  I bought 3, hopping they would do good and I would get more to make a little group.  They all died within a day.  Most would hang out at the top of the water and pant really bad.  I thought something was wrong with the water so I did a 50% water change and waited another 2 weeks before adding anything.  All the water permitters came out great, so I went back and bought 3 again.  Two were about quarter size and one was half dollar size.  One died in about an hour. So I took it back to get a new one.  That night the two small ones died, but the half dollar one lived for some reason.  So now I was mad.  I felt like a noobie again.  Ive never had trouble keeping angels before.  Ive had them for years, and even had some breed in this same water.  At one point Ive had discus with good luck, so I thought I knew what I was doing.  Last night the bigger angle died, after a week of doing great. Eating like an angel ( a pig), and had great color.  It was breathing kinda hard though.  I bought a pair of rams almost a week ago and they are doing great.  They are breathing normal, eating, and showing real personality.  I dont know what Im doing wrong.  Maybe the angels Im getting are all ready sick, or they are from real soft water, and are going through a ph shock.  But all the angels at the store are doing great, and they use the same water as me.  They are not on a main filter system, they use filter in every tank.  If you have any ideas, let me know.  Hopefully the two of use can figure this out.  Thanks for your time,

 Michael


Answer
Hello,

Hopefully I can help you out a bit, but it seems you are in quite a tight predicament here!

Gasping, as your angelfish were doing, is nearly always a sign of bad water. The only other thing it may be would be a gill disease, but it is unlikely that every batch of angelfish you have purchased have the same gill disease.

You should double check your nitrites and ammonia. By that I mean check it once with your test kit, and have a pet store check it as well. Also, if you are using test strips I recommend buying 'drop' tests instead. Test strips are not always accurate.

If it is not nitrites or ammonia, you will have to start looking at the picky details. Check chlorine and chloramine if you can. Also you may want to check non-chelated, or free, iron. It can be quite dangerous as well.

If none of those are the problem, then you should examine all you ornaments for signs of erosion. Sometimes things that are not made specifically for aquariums can leech toxins into the water. Also, try and recall if you rinsed your carbon before adding it to your filter. If you are not sure, you should clean out your filter and double check that you rinse the carbon before adding it back in.

I hope some of these suggestions help. You may also want to add a little bit of Melafix to your aquarium. It is a natural antibiotic, and it may help your angelfish if they do indeed have a disease.

Regards,
Stephanie