Thankfully, my partial water changes are never more than 25-30%, depending on how dirty the cories leave the substrate. With Cahutta, my grammode, I only do 25%, even though she is messy as heck, she really hates water changes. She cowers in her cave for a day after I do it. She's done this since she was just a tiny little 1.25" baby. Silly cichlid. I also make sure I never temperature shock my fish. Learned that with my goldfish when I was about 8 years old.
I've been keeping fish since I was about 5. I've grown up with my Dad and my Grandpa keeping fish and they taught me a lot as I watched them care for their tanks. Somehow, I never picked up that part about acclimating them with the tank water instead of just floating them. I talked to my Dad about it and he said that he does do that with his fish. I feel like a dumb, evil fish killer now. I research literally everything to death and somehow, I never realized that acclimating in that way applied to fish bought locally and used to similar water conditions.
This morning, the fish I got an acclimated yesterday are still alive. If they are still alive by the end of the week, I'll feel a bit better. I will NEVER be buying neons again. They are so beautiful and I don't want to kill them. I will keep you updated.
In the meantime - I'm used to having to WAY over-filter my tanks - because of the cichlids, goldfish, turtles, etc (not sharing tanks, lol, don't think that). In the 75 gallon I'm working with now, I have 6 cories, 6 emperor tetras, 6 glolight tetras, 4 longfin danios, and a female betta (who may or may not stay - she doesn't appear to like the current, though she's behaving nicely). I'm running a Marineland 350B and 2 large sponge filters. Do I need more than that for a community tank? I've been seriously considering a canister filter, but I'm just not sure it's necessary.
