Hi everyone! I am new to this forum, and although I've been in the fish hobby for several years, I am new to keeping discus.
I recently received several discus via mail, and noticed that one of them appeared as though its body was literally made of velvet, which is why I immediately started looking up symptoms of velvet. I have no experience with this disease. However, after a lot of online research, none of the pictures I found were similar to my fish, so I am unsure of what to do. It is behaving normally and eating well... no shaking, scraping/scratching along tank items/decor, or hiding... but I want to treat ASAP if needed before he/she starts turning dark/gasping for air at the surface of the tank. None of the other fish look like this, but one other fish I saw has 3 spots on the tail fin and one on the dorsal fin which from my experience definitely appears to be ich... but he (or she) too is behaving normally.
I uploaded 2 pictures of the "velvety" discus. It is hard to capture the velvet appearance in a photo, but it definitely appears velvety while swimming. I also added a photo of the discus that appears to have ich. Please let me know what you think...
For now, I've decided to raise the temp. Temp was 84, I am gradually in the process of raising it up to 90... And water parameters all check out fine. PH is approx 6.4.
PS... In case you can't tell in the photo... that is a fake plant. I have a bare bottom tank for easy cleaning, but felt that the discus needed something in there to make it feel less bare/stark (and the discus actually all immediately responded positively to the fake plants!). Also they are both approx 4 inches... at least that's the size I paid for, but the one in the last photo is slightly larger than the blue "velvety" one.