Aquaponics - Sad fish

Whatever it is I did wrong, I did it well.

I have some sad looking fish in my aquaponics system.

The nitrite readings are back to zero as are the ammonia readings, but the aftermath lingers on.

Most of the fish have some degree of scale damage.

And some have what looks like ulcers. I'm hoping it might have been because they were itching against sharp things because the nitrites were acting as a skin irritant, but I don't really know.











The temperatures were high over the last couple of days, and the water temperature got up to around 28 or 29c. That's pretty high water temperatures, even for an Australian native fish.

There were a lot of bugs like dragon flies around the water as I had the door to the grow house open, so It's possible the fish got a lot of natural feed that I didn't know about.

Also I've found a few ants having a bit of a swim in the system.

I found a rotting bok choy, and a rotting bean plant, that may have been contributing to the ammonia load.

Any one of these things, or all of them together may have contributed to the ammonia and nitrite spike, but I suspect I might have accidentally filled their feed jar a second time. Often they haven't eaten their maximum allotment of feed for the day, so the next day I fill the jar to the limit the system can process, and then feed them as much of that as they want over the day. But it's possible I fed them the remainder of the jar in the morning, then refilled it.

All the more reason to get this demand feeder off the bench and into the system.