High nitrite issue

[DTz]

Hey guys. I’ve started cycling my tank 3 weeks ago. Followed Brightwell ammonium dosage for my 280 gallons. I made a mistake of listening to some YouTuber saying u dun need to test nitrite and as long as ammonia is 0 and nitrate is detectable. Ur good to go. What happens next is I went ahead to add 15 fishes and next morning 3 died. 1-2 was gasping for air. I suspect it is high nitrite and went ahead to get a nitrite test kit and found out that my nitrite is above 5 ppm. I stop feeding and dose Seachem prime, which seems to stabilised the fishes. Did a 50 pct water change today and tested my nitrite, it dropped to 0.5 ppm but within 5 hours I did another test it was back to 2-5 ppm again. What else can I do to help this situation?

 

[Erric78]

I made a mistake of listening to some YouTuber saying u dun need to test nitrite and as long as ammonia is 0 and nitrate is detectable.

Is this wrong?

 

[apb03]

My Nitrates are usually around 50. That's despite weekly water changes of 10% and daily max dosage of NOPOX. My fish and corals are thriving and I have zero issues. Tank is SPS dominant.

I don't believe your issues are due to high nitrate.

 

[DTz]

My Nitrates are usually around 50. That's despite weekly water changes of 10% and daily max dosage of NOPOX. My fish and corals are thriving and I have zero issues. Tank is SPS dominant.

I don't believe your issues are due to high nitrate.

I’m having nitrite issue. Not nitrate

 

[apb03]

I’m having nitrite issue. Not nitrate

Oh sorry I misread. In that case your tank is not fully cycled yet.

You added too many fish too quickly. Your tank is not ready for such a high bioload. At this point I think you should test often and do lots of water changes until the nutrifying bacteria is more established.

 

[gbroadbridge]

Hey guys. I’ve started cycling my tank 3 weeks ago. Followed Brightwell ammonium dosage for my 280 gallons. I made a mistake of listening to some YouTuber saying u dun need to test nitrite and as long as ammonia is 0 and nitrate is detectable. Ur good to go. What happens next is I went ahead to add 15 fishes and next morning 3 died. 1-2 was gasping for air. I suspect it is high nitrite and went ahead to get a nitrite test kit and found out that my nitrite is above 5 ppm. I stop feeding and dose Seachem prime, which seems to stabilised the fishes. Did a 50 pct water change today and tested my nitrite, it dropped to 0.5 ppm but within 5 hours I did another test it was back to 2-5 ppm again. What else can I do to help this situation?

Nitrite is irrelevant in a saltwater tank.

If Ammonia is 0 and you have visible Nitrate the tank is cycled.

However, that means it is okay to add CUC like snails, before adding one or at the most two fish.

You have added fish too fast, and the immature tank could not keep up with converting ammonia from the fish to Nitrate. The fish died from Ammonia poisoning, not from Nitrite.

Seachem Prime is useless in your situation as it does nothing to reduce Ammonia.
You must keep doing water changes until the tank catches up.

 

[Mr. Mojo Rising]

we add fishes very slowly in this hobby, every time you add fish, you need to give time to your tank to build up the bacteria needed to support the bioload.

Adding 15 fish at once is a big mistake, you overloaded the biofilter, the tank cannot convert the ammonia into nitrite/nitrate fast enough.

Even for a large tank like yours, you should add 5-6 fish, then wait a month before the next 5-6 fish, then wait another month..... patience is key in this hobby. Going too fast results in death and disease.

Is there a protein skimmer in the tank? If no skimmer, then the water surface should be very agitated to help put oxygen into the water.

 

[DTz]

Nitrite is irrelevant in a saltwater tank.

If Ammonia is 0 and you have visible Nitrate the tank is cycled.

However, that means it is okay to add CUC like snails, before adding one or at the most two fish.

You have added fish too fast, and the immature tank could not keep up with converting ammonia from the fish to Nitrate. The fish died from Ammonia poisoning, not from Nitrite.

Seachem Prime is useless in your situation as it does nothing to reduce Ammonia.
You must keep doing water changes until the tank catches up.

But the ammonia test shows it’s at 0 . I have another tank which is cycling too from the same batch of water. Even without fishes. The nitrite is at 5 ppm or more

 

[gbroadbridge]

But the ammonia test shows it’s at 0 . I have another tank which is cycling too from the same batch of water. Even without fishes. The nitrite is at 5 ppm or more

As I said, Nitrite even at 100ppm will not kill fish in a saltwater tank

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

The utuber was likely right. It's fine to measure nitrite, but it takes far more than a few ppm of nitrite to kill fish in seawater. More like hundreds to thousands of ppm (see table 2 in the article below). The lowest amount of nitrite that I could find killed fish in a short period of time was 146 ppm:

Nitrite and the Reef Aquarium by Randy Holmes-Farley - Reefkeeping.com


New fish die all the time for unknown reasons. Might be ammonia (despite your test results) or disease.

 

[Cell]

15 fish seems like a lot, but size of fish matters. Still, we put 1 fish in 10 gallon which would be equivalent to 10 in 100G. 15 in a 280 then seems reasonable in terms of bioload. Disease is a different factor though.

 

[jda]

That that has happened when the ammonia is near zero and nitrate is rising is that you have some amount of bacteria that can process some fish waste. This does NOT mean that the tank is cycled, as in done. It is in the process of cycling. You can progress with the tank as long as you are smart and go slow.

I don't know if the fish died because of elevated ammonia, but you can likely bet that those 15 fish did produce more waste than your tank could currently handle. The tank should quickly catch up, but death could have happened. Also, and this is very important that many so-called cycle experts do not point out is that fish DO NOT have to die to have gill and other damage from high ammonia - think of respiratory damage to humans that just shorten life or give cancer, but not death. Fish don't have 1-800 lawyers on during mid-day Judge and talk shows to represent them in class-action lawsuits when hobbyists stock too fast.

Even though we do not know, fish gasping for air is really bad and a good sign that gills were damaged, probably from ammonia. Not all fish react to ammonia at the same levels, so it is normal for some to die while some have gill damage and others are not affected much at all. If you lose some more fish in the next few months for no reason, this ammonia exposure could be the reason, so don't try and chase any other explanations if you cannot come up with any simple ones.

There are sensitive fish that can be harmed by high nitrite, but we are talking levels likely that you never hit. Even then, nitrite is more of a slow death thing and not instant.

 

[jda]

That fast production of nitrite from .5 to 2-5.0 is a sign that there was plenty of ammonia to process. There are smart people that can likely tell you how much ammonia was needed to produce 5.0 of nitrite, but I am not one of them.