Expert Help in Connecticut?

[rkershen]

Hi All.
I am having some "struggles" with a relatively new Discus + tetras tank setup (170 gallons) (six months) and was wondering if there are any expert aquarists in my State of CT who would be willing to help? Have an undiagnosed issue and can't figure out where to go from here... I know this is a vague request and I apologize. This forum is excellent and I have learned a lot but would be most interested in someone who could help me via a personal consultation. Willing to pay for your time. If you live in CT or know of some knowledgeable experts please let me know. thanks!

[brady]

Post your problems on the site and you will get a lot
of help.
Jay

[jeep]

I agree. I would suggest copying this post, fill out the questionnaire and paste it back here. There are many of people here who may be able to assist...

http://forum.simplydiscus.com/showth...lease-complete

[Iminit]

Can’t hurt! Post what’s going on and many here will help. You will get step by step instructions .

[rkershen]

OK. will do.

[rkershen]

1. Please explain the problems with your fish. When did you notice the problems and did anything unusual happen that you think started them?

For some background: I started keeping discus about two years ago. My first fish were locally bred by a hobby breeder and are still going strong. I also bought fish when I was down in Florida at Wattley and they too did great for a long time though I lost a few due to them becoming spooked and jumping out of my tank.

I have bought multiple different discus from multiple reputable breeders and generally have done well with them with the usual hiccups along the way.

More recently I have been getting my fish from a very reputable source importer and have been having a lot of trouble and have lost multiple fish and (also money). The fish are beautiful and seem very healthy when I get them. I have quarantined them in their own tank for several months with no issues. They act normally and eat healthy. The problems start when I transfer them to my new display tank. (which has had no discus in it) It is a 170 gallon aquarium with three large canister filters (two FX6's and one eheim classic 1500XL) with a ton of biomedia. I started the tank about four or five months ago. I unfortunately had an initial issue when I first introduced fish once it was cycled with some established media as i put a school of cardinal tetras in who I think had tail rot when I got them and didn’t notice and I lost them all. After that happened, I treated the tank with Potassium Permanganate x 2 and slowly restocked it with more cardinal tetras and some coreys and congo tetras who all have been doing very well for the most part. I do lose an occasional fish now and then for unknown reasons but have a school of 60 cardinals and have only lost a couple.

Several months ago, I slowly introduced discus (put in three and they all ended up dying then after another attempt a couple of months later after redosing PP in the tank and a month of time i've lost another 4. So far I have lost 7 fish. All of them have the same illness. Symptoms: They stop eating after about a week in the aquarium but otherwise look healthy. This continues for a second week and thinking they had hexamita from the stress of the move, I transfer them back to a quarantine tank and treat them with salt and metronidazole. Over the next week, they don’t improve, don’t eat and several of them developed “Dropsy” like symptoms with swollen abdomens and bulging eyes. They don’t poop much except an occasional white mucus. No fin rot, no open sores or other lesions. I couldn’t save any of them, even with resorting to pure kanamycin treatment (albeit a little too late I suppose).

I was wondering if they could have aeromonas or vibrio? What do you think could be going on?

As I mentioned, all of the other non-discus fish (60 cardinal tetras; 10 coreys and some ottos) in the tank are healthy, active and normal.


2. Symptoms: loss of appetite initially followed by white feces and bloat/dropsy/eye bulging

3. What medications/ treatments have you already tried and what were the results. Include dosage and duration of treatment.
Pure metronidazole, Kanamycin, Salt etc.


Tank/Water

4. Tank size and ages, numbers and sizes of fish.
167 gallon - 6 months old. No discus at present as they did not make it

5. Water change regime (What percentage and how often).
That tank is on automatic water changes 30 gallons per day.


6. How long has tank been running? Is it bare bottom? If you have substrate, what type and how deep is it?
6 months
Sand Substrate ½-¾ inch. Lava rock and driftwood only.


7. Do you age your water? If you do for how long and what is the ph swing.
Yes, in a barrel but on auto water changes so new water coming in automatically
No PH swing at all with new or old H20.

8. What type/brand water conditioner do you use? Do you add it to the tank or aging barrel? How much do you use?
I use Prime but have a whole house water conditioning setup with activated carbon so don’t add it to my aging barrel routinely.

9. Parameters and water source;

Note: Water Parameters are important in diagnosing problems within a tank. If you don't own test kits for the following information, you can purchase them, test your parameters and post this info as soon as possible.


- temp __81-83 degrees F.___

- ph 6.0

- ammonia reading _0___

- nitrite reading __0__

- nitrate reading __10__

What type of water or combinations of water sources do you use? If it is an RO/tap/well water mix, please list percentages in the mix.

- municipal water _X___


10. Any new fish, plants or inverts added recently.
None except current inhabitants. (Congo tetras; cardinal tetras; Sterbai Coreys)

11. Please tell us what you feed your fish and how often. This can be critical information for solving the problem so be as specific as you can.
Variety of foods. Vibra bites; discus flakes; hikari blood worms, freeze dried blackworms from
Al S.; occasional frozen mysis shrimp

12. Include any pictures or videos you have which shows the symptoms. If you can't add them to this post, please provide a link to them.
No pictures, but they have developed classic dropsy in the past.
Last group I lost, just had anorexia and never developed signs of abdominal swelling.

[fljones3]

Is there any difference between the quarantine tank setup and the display tank? What size? Same substrat, same 18% WC, etc.
I would think that your WC are too small but others will chime in.

[jeep]

I'd like to see some photos if you can post them.

If this only seems to happen after you transfer the discus to the new tank then I suspect some sort of cross contamintaion.

Can you tell us who the seller is? If you're not comfortable you can send me a private message.

[Iminit]

Ok so you still have the store bought and what’s left of the wattleys in another tank? How is this tank running? Same as the 170? Discus are fine through out qt. Eating well and acting normal. How long does it take for them to start getting sick?
Not a fan of auto changers. From where does the water exit the tank? The bottom? 81 is kind of low. Lowest is 82 and most go to 84. Ph is 6.0 out of tap? Do the discus get dark once in the new tank?

[bossanova]

2 things that jump out to me that I would immediately look to rule out as causing a problem:

1. Your temp. may be too low, I keep it up to 84-86

2. Your auto-changer. Do 50-75% daily or every other day, and use a big dose of seachem SAFE (forget prime for big tanks). I learned the hard way that in my city I needed to double the dose on the packaging, as well as dose for the full volume of my tank+sump even if I only changed 50%. Haven’t had an issue in years.

Q, how much and what type of bio media are you running? Can you add airstones to your tank?

[rkershen]

thanks everyone for your thoughtful responses and questions. here are my answers:

Q: Is there any difference between the quarantine tank setup and the display tank? What size? Same substrat, same 18% WC, etc.
A: I have about 8 tanks in my basement for new discus. all are bare bottom except for two of them which also have sand. - the discus who did not make it in the display were in both types of tanks and were introduced at different times (ie. first group from one tank who didn't last long then a couple of months later the second group). Both sets were from same breeder. i generally only do WC's on those tanks q 2-3 days (50%) and they were doing great for 2-3 mos in the quarantine tanks.

Comment: If this only seems to happen after you transfer the discus to the new tank then I suspect some sort of cross contamintaion.
Can you tell us who the seller is? If you're not comfortable you can send me a private message. (PM will be sent)
A: i agree. i was worried about that and thought maybe the cardinal tetras that died introduced some bad bacteria that were lingering. After the first group of discus got sick I treated the tank with PP and left it empty for a while, then re-established it with more cardinals who did great before i re-introduced any discus.

Q: Ok so you still have the store bought and what’s left of the wattleys in another tank? How is this tank running? Same as the 170? Discus are fine through out qt. Eating well and acting normal. How long does it take for them to start getting sick?
Not a fan of auto changers. From where does the water exit the tank? The bottom? 81 is kind of low. Lowest is 82 and most go to 84. Ph is 6.0 out of tap? Do the discus get dark once in the new tank?
A: yes, i have about four tanks with discus and all have been running about 2 years. Discus are fine during prolonged quarantine. Occasionally I have had some whirling etc in which case I quarantine those fish and treat them individually.
My other display tank with the Wattley guys also have some discuss from Discus Madness and My local breeder (those fish are more than 2 years old) and I have had no problems with Cross Contam and that tank also has sand and driftwood.
First week in the display everything fine.
Second week they stop eating
Third week the dying starts. (usually try to save them back in QT prior to death but nothing has worked).
They don't turn black. No fin clamping.
At the end of life a few have gotten some red patches so I was worried about vibrio/aeromonas.
First group that died got swollen/dropsy after a while. Second group that died did not.

I no longer have any living fish from the breeder whose fish did not make it in display. (name sent privately)

Tank temp is mostly at 82-84.
AUTO WC is via an apex controller and two dose pumps.
WC occurs at the top third of the tank and occurs over 16 hours per day.
Water is in the 6ish range out of the tap, probably in part as I have a whole house filter in place.


Q/Comment:
1. Your temp. may be too low, I keep it up to 84-86
I have tried to keep it a little lower so that the Sterbais and Cardinals and Congos can handle it ok. Do you think I should raise the temp?

2. Your auto-changer. Do 50-75% daily or every other day, and use a big dose of seachem SAFE (forget prime for big tanks). I learned the hard way that in my city I needed to double the dose on the packaging, as well as dose for the full volume of my tank+sump even if I only changed 50%. Haven’t had an issue in years.

I can try to bump up the Daily WC to 40gallons (20%) but don't think my AW system can do much more than that.
What I was thinking was to do a bigger manual change once per week (more like 50%)

Would you add safe directly to the tank or into the Water storage container?

Q, how much and what type of bio media are you running? Can you add airstones to your tan
All three large canister filters have a huge amount of seachem matrix in them (massive amount actually.

[jwcarlson]

So what are you doing to remove all of the waste and excess food? They physical debris, I mean? Does the auto water change somehow get this out? I remember seeing one that had a low entry point that stirred the bottoms in some facility, but that was bare bottom and not 170 gallons.

Apologies if I missed this above.

[rkershen]

i vacuum out any debris but really there isn't much as the coreys make short work of it. I am very carefully and if any uneaten food is left I vacuum it out.
I was thinking that if it was a waste issue, nitrates would be very high, no?

[Iminit]

There are other things in the water that need to be replenished. The fact that the auto changer is just removing water from the top of the tank means it’s not moving anything in the rest of the tank. Others have had problems with auto changers for this reason. Is there a water changer in the other main tank?

[fljones3]

I wonder if it's something that might take more than a couple of months to manifest. In the quarantine, it's managed but; then, when they are moved (stressed) it gets the upper hand.
Are there diseases that might work that way?