Ammonia high!

shoorty069

Member
How do i get ammonia levels to lower? Mine seem to keep getting higher. I just tested it and the test is going on as we speak, but the test i have says the darker green it is, the worse it is. Its at about .20 now with about 10 minutes to go in the process. Any ideas how or why this happened?
I have a 55gallon tank Fowlr
2 anemones.
1 clarkii
1 blue damsel
1 starfish
1 pink and blue goby
3 snails
20lbs of liverock. Crushed coral/livesand seabed.
5 hermit crabs (ones HUGE and almost the size of 2 golf balls combined...)
Emperor 400 filter with 2 biowheels
Newly added SeaClone 100 protein skimmer.
Theres also this new stuff my lfs suggested to put in the filter cartridges. One is called Hypersorb synthetic adsorbent, and Purigen ultimate filtration. Both are made from Seachem. Im not sure what they do, but the guy suggested them and said they help with the water quality and said it would lower the ammonia, but so far, no luck with that...
<3ryry
EDIT>>> okay, it finished at a .30 . I heard anything over .0 is bad, and i dont want another wipeout.
 

mikeyjer

Active Member
I hope you have a good lighting system in your tank for those anemones. How old is your tank anyway? Ammonia spikes during cycle, did you cycle your tank first? It can also be a cause by a die off of something, example, fish and stuffs on the live rock. IF you cycled already, when did you add the live rock? Before cycle or after you added fish? If after adding fish, how many lbs did you add at one time, cured or uncured? We need to know those stuffs!!!
 

hedonic

Member
All of what Mikeyjer said is true, and one of them could be the culprit, but 0.3 ammonia is not going to kill anything. Although if your PH is high (8.6+) the ammonia is more toxic to fish. So 0.3 could be a problem in that context. More LR will help keep ammonia low as well. It is good to be aware of it though as your anemones will be the first to suffer if that ammonia continues to rise!
 

shoorty069

Member
The anemones are fine. The person that ran (when i say ran it, he owns it. Its a salt water fish only store) the petstore told me the anemones i have dont require much lighting. Theyre both doing quite well. Anyway, the tank has been running for about...6 months now. The liverock has been in there since the begining of june. It was from SWF.com.
Oh, and i did have a CC starfish(very tiny, maybe about an inch and a half in size) recently die, but my hermit crab ate it. and cant find anything left of it...
<3ryry
 
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