Water quality

I've just done a test and there seems to be ammonia, nitrites and nitrates back in the aquarium. It is cycled and I do a 20% water change every week (on Sundays). Why has this happened?!?!

There might be some leftover food or waste under the sand in our tank. Do you clean your filter. i do mine every second sunday and do everything else every sunday. Stir up the sand a bit and direct the swirl toward the filter so it sucks everything bad up. See how the levels are after you clean the filter and leave it run for a day and swirl the sand to get rid of the nasties and waste

Oh and have you got any live plants. they help get rid of the Nitrate

Thanks for that Jay!

I have live plants in the tank but I reckon the culprit is fecal matter and left-over food... I don't have a turkey baster (as we don't seem to have them here in Finland), but I have a gravel cleaner, which doesn't really do the job of sucking everything up. I'll try and get some friend from the UK to send me a baster as they seem to be much more practical than the gravel cleaner...

I cleaned out the filter, did a 25% water change and swished the sand around. I then left it for about 10 minutes and did another test. The ammonia's still lurking but the nitrites and trates have gone down. I'll do another test in a few hours and if there's still ammonia I'll pop the pups in a bucket of de-chlorinated water with a few plants so that they feel they're gone on an exotic-flavoured holiday rather than shoved in some horrid bucket...

I went to the shop I bought them at and their brothers and sisters are *tiny* in comparison. Mine have grown about twenty times the size of their siblings. Would be such a shame to lose them now...

I've just tested the water again and the ammonia is worse. I've taken the axies out and put them in a bucket with some plants. I don't want to chance anything so I'll leave them there until the water in the aquarium stabilises again. Weird...