MLAARE -Loosing Fish

Sometimes I wonder if people come into the store and hex our fish.
Seriously I do.
Do they somehow sneak in in the middle of the night (doubtful due to alarms) and hexed them? Or did they just sneak inside and somehow put poison into our waters?

So.
Last week we got in a shipment of goldfish. The feeder fish.
The ones that people use in carnivals, feed other animals, or keep in ponds.

We had a ton of Large ones. Enough that I had to put them in another tank to keep from overcrowding the other two that I had. The number ended up being around 600 this week.
We also had medium, that were much needed. Also totaling around 600 or so.
Then we had smalls, that we were low on and so were expecting a shipment of them next week.

This week, on Tuesday, we got in that shipment of fish.
But we also got in more medium fish. :S
Bringing our total fish number up to around 1,000.
()_() That's ALOT of fish. And regrettably I didn't divide those ones up further from two tanks into three.
As well as some more small fish. Bringing the total up to 600ish.

So a day later, when I went through to update the fish numbers to make sure that we had approximately the number that the computer system thought we had.

Again that was like 600, 1,000 and 600 fish.
So over 2,000 fish.

A lot.
It was great.
The dead fish weren't anything out of the usual. You usually have a few die.

So I left soon after my shift.
Thinking nothing was wrong.

Apparently  something was wrong, as a coworker noticed that the goldfish were beginning to gasp at the surface for air. Usually meaning that a) one of the tanks water valves had blocked up an easy fix. or b) they were suffering from Ammonia burn. Where the gills had basically been burned from too much ammonia in the water.
Considering that we had so many fish...that's not uncommon. So it was decided to treat for ammonia. Just in case.

In any case....when I came in the next day...
I noticed that there were dead fish. :S
More than there had been yesterday.

It didn't look too bad.
But...it got worse when I was finally able to pull out the dead.

We have different size baggies to bag up the fish right?
Well we have one that is like 4 inches by 12 inches.

And I basically filled that bag full of fish. There was like an inch or two of free space.
But that bag was full. Full of dead goldfish.
I pulled at least 200 possibly up to 400 goldfish then.
So from 2000 down to 1600.
That's not good...
I did everything I could think of to help the fish. Cleaned the system, fed them, adjusted water flow, tested for chemical imbalances. See if the Ammonia was out of control, or the Nitrates or Nitrites...things that could kill the fish.

Nothing.
Everything was normal.
There was nothing out of the ordinary!

And yet,
Thrice more during my 8 hour shift, I pulled out more and more dead fish.
I lost like 200 Large.
I lost like 200 Small.
I lost like 600 Medium. :S

Yah, I'd lost basically half of our Medium fish within one shift. ONE shift.
And they were still dying off when I left!
And continued dying off.
For no visible reason!

Seriously.
Did someone poison our fish!

I came in today to find.
No Smalls. (we got in another shipment and sold those ones, but the 600 before that. Dead.)
A handful of Mediums. Like...20 of them.
And then like 200 Large ones.

So out of 2000 fish.

I had like 200 fish left.
And those ones weren't looking good either.
It won't surprise me if they die off in the next couple of days as well.

but HOW!
How can we go from 2000 fish to 200?!?!
It doesn't make sense.
Nothing was out of the ordinary!!

Why?

I'll probably never know.
*exhales.*
And that's annoying.

-Sarnic Dirchi