Yeast in my tank

[seiji64]

I came into work this morning to a cloudy tank. Turns out my Nutrafin CO2 bottle had tipped over and maybe half the yeast mixture was now in my tank. The fish, shrimp, snails, and crays all seems to be acting normally. I did an ~80% water change and the water is still a little cloudy. Should I do anything else? More water changes? Add Carbon? Add flour and bake at 360 for 20 minutes? Seriously, are my tank inhabitants in any danger from this stuff? I'm thinking the alcohol produced by the yeast might be harmful to them, but it was just mixed on Friday so I think the alcohol levels were pretty low. Let me know your thoughts.

Thanks,
Doug

[PadreJP]

This is a completely 100% meaningful-information-free response. But asking about alcohol reminded me of a thread posted on another website (Aquarium Advice, I think, or one of those general aquarium info forums) where a college student related the story of how he was out on a Friday or Saturday night and got back late, and when he walked into his dorm room he saw his roommate and several of his roommate's friends dumping cans of beer into his (the guy just arriving home) 10 gallon aquarium--something they had been doing for a while it seems. Apparently the group of them were, um, having a good time and decided it would be fun to "see if we can get the fish drunk."

One massive water change later, the end result was the kid was able to save about half of his fish.

So I guess the lesson here is that if you could have around 50% survival after the addition of several entire cans of beer to a 10 gallon tank, then I suspect the relatively low level of alcohol from the yeast reactor would be a minor concern. If anything, it might pose a greater danger to your filter bacteria than to any of your fish.

[Ghazanfar Ghori]

The concern with that mixture in your tank, if I remember correctly, is the sugar.
It'll cause a bacteria bloom (cloudy water) which sucks up all the available O2.
Keep doing water changes...

[seiji64]

Thank you for that info. I've done an additional 50% WC, followed by a 90% and am keeping an eye on the cloudiness of the water and signs of stress on the tankmates. Thankfully it is only a 7 gallon tank, so water changes aren't too painful. Knock on wood - everybody still looks fine.

Thanks again,
Doug

[nickman]

when i had my 125 set up about 5 years ago, i fed my DIY CO2 rig into the intake of the mag7 return pump in my sump. that worked great for about 8 months until one day i came home to 125 gallons of cloudy moonshine. the pump had sucked about 2 liters (out of 4 total) of month old alcohol and yeast into my tank. I did 50% water changes over the next 3 days and only lost 1 bala shark and 2 cardinals out of a school of about 25. the rest of my dwarf cichlids, tetras, barbs and cory cats were fine. not sure how but I (and my fish) escaped that relatively unscathed.

moral of that story i guess is that a low concentration of alcohol/bacteria ect. for a short duration is fairly harmless. I def agree that the bacteria consuming all of the O2 is prob your biggest concern.

-nick

[Sonny Disposition]

A really non traditional approach would be to take the fish out, and house them elsewhere for a few days. Shut the filtration off, and add a bag of daphnia to the tank. They'll clear it up in about a week. (Daphnia love yeast.)

[ingg]

We'll show you how to try and avoid that in the future at the next meeting btw. Sorry to hear, not fun to try and clean up.