What is this? please help ( pic included)

well I hope the picture works. But here is what I am seeing. Little white flakes / little white cotton looking things. If you can see the picture there is a cotton cooking piece on the rock. But I am also getting white flakes of some sort. Any one have any idea what these/ they are and how to treat it?

I have been doing water changes everyother day about 1/4 of the tank to try and fix it.

please help!

The rank was set up for 6 months and then i cleaned it really good thinking it needed a good cleaning. Wondering if this has somethign to do with it recycling? but if so this is my first time cycing the tank. When i bought the axolotol the guy I bought it from gave me everything i needed. Including the tank / filter/ food/ everythign! had it 100% good to go.

The picture isn't coming up. Try going into advanced mode and posting the picture as an attachment, it'll be at the bottom.

What type of dechlorinater do you use? Does it contain aloe? Does your axolotl look irritated?


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I use the Petco brand. After water changes it is clear for about 3 days then it comes back. No aloe.

Also the white flakes I get a lot when I rub the glass sides inside the tank. But the cotton stuff is in the pic.

My axolotl is happy and eating good. No signs of stress.

The white flakes sound like maybe protein build up? I get rid of mine by scrubbing the glass while and holding the tube from the water changer near it, and the filter sucks the rest in so it would just be a swish of the filter media in a bucket of old tank water.

I have no idea what the cotton thing is. Is it on the glass or floating?

The cotton just floats around and yes I do the same I guess its just normal maintance?

That's what I would think, but at water changes every other day it seems like a bit too much. Any idea what the GPH rating is on your filter? I believe it should be at least 4x the gallons your tank holds to keep it nice and clean. Have you cleaned out the filter media? Just swooshing it in old tank water will do, you can also over-clean it but I'm not sure if what you did would have done it. If you don't have a lot of media in there that could do it, if so you could put some filter floss/quilt batting (from arts and craft) in there.

A big clean up could have kicked up some stuff, but I find it usually settles down within a few hours at most. Just to be safe, have you done a water test to check the water parameters? You would want to check ammonia, nitrite and nitrate at least.

My filter is a tetra 10-30i whisper. Has a big black roam but it doesn't look like it'll hold anything lol but it also comes with a large bag with carbon in it. I'll give it some more time and see what happens. I have a 20 gallon long tank. Not sure what a better filter would be. Any eBay links would be helpful. But I like the whisper becuz it is really slow water flow. I did change out the filter bag because it say to every 30 days but I'm reading not to do that. So no more.

Have pulled out any of this 'stuff' and examined it? The picture isn't too clear - it could be a soggy pellet, it could be a spermatophore, it could be fungus or bacteria.

The white flakes are most probably salts from hard water - like limescale. You can scrub it off as Cacique described when you change water.

I think your right. I forgot to add I put a fan on the top of my tank to keep it cool. I'm thibkibgvrhe faster evaporation is making the hard water aspects show. Thanks for all the help.

That could be it, I have hard water stains at the top above the water line from evaporation. I also have a fan blowing into my tank.

I would recommend, if you're up for it, to just replace the carbon with more sponge or filter floss/quilt batting or ceramic media, because the carbon is pretty much pointless from what I've read. You could use the space for media that will hold more beneficial bacteria. Every week or 2, I would take the black sponge out when you do the water change and squeeze it a few times in the bucket of old water until you stop seeing gunk coming off of it.

Also, you really shouldn't replace your filter media unless it's falling apart. The filter media holds the beneficial bacteria (the cycle) so you want to keep that as long as possible. When replacing it, replace only part of it so that the old piece of media will seed the bacteria onto the new filter media.

Sometimes the sponge doesn't look bad, but it turns out all the gunk is just inside it and it comes out with some squeezing in the old water. This shouldn't cause the issues you're having, but if your sponge is clogged/dirty it could slow down the filtration and keep more of that stuff on the water.

Thanks for all the help. I have been thinking about adding a bag of purigen instead of carbon. I will look into some more filling into the filtertoo.

Ceramic media is better for a filter as it has lots of little holes creating surface area for the 'good bacteria' to grow

fluval ceramic bio max is a ceramic media it literally lasts until it crumbles, which is years haha!

I just cut a circle out of the middle of my sponge and popped as many ceramic bits in as i could fit in the hole then put a little circle of sponge over the top to stop them all falling out
Of course some people just have different compartments in their filters and you would just put it in there instead.

If your worried your filter isnt doing enough, try adding a small sponge filter in there too