Why is my aquarium water cloudy?

Question

5 gallon...just started , added 7 ghost shrimp, 3 feeder guppies, 1 albino cory cat..

3 shrimp have died.

Answer 1

Hello, because your tank is so new there is not enough "good bacteria" to break down the waste inside the tank.  For a brand new 5 gallon tank I probably would not have added all of those at one time. That's a large bio load for a brand new tank.  Not to mention that 8 of those specimens eat the extra waste that an older established tank has.  For right now you are going to want to add a bacteria additive such as Cycle or Stability to help get the tank stable.  If you have test kit I would recommend testing your water, if you don't any Petsmart or Petco will offer free water testing. You want to look for Ammonia and Nitrite, each of these should be at "0".  Once your tank is cycled meaning each the ammonia and nitrite are at 0 the tank is established and the tank shouldn't be cloudy anymore.  If you add something that's just for cloudy water you will just be covering up the problem, if you treat the cause of the cloudy water a healthy clear tank should appear. Good luck!

Answer 2

i had that same problem, don't worry it'll go away, but you should have waited to put in the fish.

Answer 3

Too many fish for a small, new and uncycled tank. Ammonia will be building up in the water, poisoning the more delicate shrimps first and causing a bloom of bacteria that makes the water look cloudy.

As you have fish in there now the only thing you can do is large partial water changes to control the ammonia levels. You may need to do this every day for 2 or 3 weeks to keep your fish alive untill the filters cycle is established.

Small tanks are a lot less forgiving than large ones as ammonia can build up much faster in the small volume of water.

have a read of the link below, it will explain what is going wrong, but the emergency fix is to keep doing partial water changes untill the tank settles down.

Ian

Answer 4

Many reasons for cloudy water...how long did you wait before you put in the fish?? You need to give the tank time to season...get a good fish book and read up before continuing...you might be able to keep the guppies and the catfish alive if you're careful...5 gal tank is too small for the amount you tried to keep....Are you filtering?  Make sure you take out the dead shrimp...the rest probably will die also....don't overfeed, and if you don't have filtration, you'll lose all of them....Please get a good aquarium start up book or go on line for info....

Answer 5

You probably have too many fish in there. Also, if you're just starting, it's likely that you didn't cycle your tank, which means that all the ammonia your fish are producing isn't getting removed from the tank. This is usually called 'New Tank Syndrome' Your tank needs to cultivate beneficial bacteria to process out the ammonia and turn it into nitrite and then nitrate. You should Google tank cycling, and since you've already added fish it seems like you're going to have to wait it out until there's enough bacteria to process the ammonia.