amonia level

[Lav]

I have 3 week old angel babies. They are in a 10 gal. tank with a sponge filter, a carbon filter, and an air stone. I am doing a lot of water changes with my parent tank to keep the same water for the babies. Problem is the amonia level keeps going up. Not sure what I am doing wrong. Can anyone help?

[Fishguy2727]

sounds like the sponge filter wasnt fully colonized, at least not for the current bioload. or it was destroyed. do you have another sponge filter in an established tank? im assuming there is no ammonia in the parent tank.

[kimmers318]

What do you mean you are doing water changes with parent tank? I am understanding that you are taking water from parent tank and putting it into the fry tank for your water changes. What is the reason for this? What water do you use for your parent tank water changes? If you are using tap water to do water changes for parent tank, then using fresh water for fry tank would be using the same water, all of the parameters would be the same. Are you getting ammonia readings in the parent tank? If you are, you are putting ammonia into the fry tank with the water.
And reptileguy is probably right that the bacteria either wasn't colonized, or not enough for the bioload, or had been destroyed. If you have some filter bags, or even clean pantyhose, you can grab some gravel from the parent tank to put in for a few days to add some bacteria. Taking gravel from my large tank helped another tank of mine that kept spiking due to losing the bacteria from meds. Water changes just weren't keeping the ammonia or nitrites down, but adding a bag of gravel took care of the problem in about a day or so.