sick fish

[Eddie]

actually I think the temp may be a problem. the tank has been 85 or 85.5 deg. The fish have been hanging in one corner of the tank which I think happens to be the coolest spot in the tank. I just dropped the temp on the heaters a few degrees. I have done 2 doses of QC. I've been doing them in the evening. Should I do a third treatment tonight?

I would never dose QC unless you are available to monitor the fish for several hours. Dosing the tank and going to bed can turn disastrous if something goes wrong.

Drop the temp and make sure you have extra air going into the tank.

You may want to hold up until the morning to hit them again. This way you can watch them.

Eddie

[merk175]

I've been doing the treatments about 7pm. I've got to go out tonight so perhaps I should wait till the morning for the third treatment??? If I do wait until tomorrow for 3rd treatment, should I do a WC today?

[Eddie]

I've been doing the treatments about 7pm. I've got to go out tonight so perhaps I should wait till the morning for the third treatment??? If I do wait until tomorrow for 3rd treatment, should I do a WC today?

You don't really need to, it shouldn't matter. Everything is pretty much used up after 24 hours. You can wait until tomorrow if you want.

Also, check your water for any traces of ammonia/nitrite. If you do have evidence of either of those, I'd do a WC.

Eddie

[merk175]

ammonia is 0. nitrates are about 13 ppm

[Daniella]

no contradiction at all. This disease with my fish lasted nearly 3 weeks. I first did tetracycline on the advise of my petshop. I went here and got the advise on Quick cure. did that for 4 days in my QT, no result what so ever. nip..and they were getting worse.

I then was fed up with seing my fish going worse as I woke up one morning to see my melon floating on water surface on the QT with Quick cure, very near death. I had 2 tanks during this disease, one with tetracycline in it and one QT tank with Quick cure, a canister filter and 6 inches air stone. Temp was around 80 or 82, can't remember. I did not wanted to mix quick cure and tetracycline.

I put the dying fish back in the tetracycline tank (main tank) wait 4 hours, no improvement, it was still floating, closer and closer to death and bearely breathing. I then took it and gave it a strong 10ppm PP bath for 3 minutes, put it back in the main tank with tetracycline. 15 minutes later the fish started to go down a little bit and coming back to life, doing effort to regain its balance. 30 minutes later it was swimming normaly.

I then started 5 treatment of PP. 2 days PP, one day rest, etc... AND AT THE END of this, I did 3 days of parasite clear to make sure they did not have any internal bugs that could slow down their recovery.

You should see the fishes now, wow they are getting all their fat back. They could eat all day if I would put food all day.

It's an amazing recovery from near death to health.

Now I have 3 new fishes that an importer was keeping for me until I had gone over that disease. They are in my QT for 2 days now but I could see them flashing on objects in the tank there. I brought them home and watched the fisrt day...some scrathing on the tubing and breathing from one gill fast. FLukes I guess. Did a PP bath and no more breathing from one gill, breathing normaly now. I need to do more because one I am sure is not enough to kill all the flukes.

Now I will treat those with parasite clear to make sure they have no worms or internal parasites before I introduce them in my main tank.

They have a very good appetite and look more relaxed now.

Daniella,

Here is a quote from a post that you posted today. Why did you say that you will treat your fish with Parasite Clear and above you just said you went through a 3 day course of it. A little contradiction in the stories.

[merk175]

what is permanganate potasium and where do you get it?

[Roxanne]

...whoa Merk....have you read all these?

http://forum.simplydiscus.com/showthread.php?t=70066

you get it from the chemist usually...please be careful and ask for help here before you do anything with it ok?

Roxanne

[Daniella]

good advise and you CANNOT mix it with formaline so you would have to wait a few days before using PP after you used Quick Cure.

I did my PP treatments right after doing a Quick cure treatment because I had no choice and nothing to lose since my fish were dying but it is best to wait a little in between treatment.

I did not had any adverse reaction by using PP right after using Quick cure and you must not use both treatments together, ever. Before using PP you would need to make sure there is no more formalin on your fish body, so clean water for a few hours at least. I had removed my fish from Quick cure at least 4 hours before putting it in PP.

You can find PP in Ace Hardware and some Sears store. Be carefull if you do find it, it stain and the power will stain and burn your skin. A gram scale is essential. If you do not have any, go to the pharmacie and ask them to weight it for you or buy a gram scale.

...whoa Merk....have you read all these?

http://forum.simplydiscus.com/showthread.php?t=70066

you get it from the chemist usually...please be careful and ask for help here before you do anything with it ok?

Roxanne

[merk175]

thank you all for your advice. I'm not ready to get "aggressive" with treatment of my discus yet. I only asked the question because if my fish take a big turn for the worst, I'm not prepared to do anything about it. All I have available to me right now is QC, Prazi and salt.... and based on what I'm seeing so far, none are working (although I have not tried Prazi). I'm hoping the QC treatments do the trick. If not, I want to be prepared.

[Daniella]

PP is a really good thing to have on hand. I would continue with the Quick Cure treatment for your fishes and if in 4 days nothing change and they get worse, then I would go other route.

It will probably work for you. It did not work for me but maybe what they had was deeper than just parasites and in that case QC won't do any good.


If you can find PP, then you will be ready for all eventualities. You can prepare a stock solution of one gram per one liter, then you would need 2mg per litter to do 2ppm. So for a 20 gallons aquarium it is 145mg of PP.

If you have a stock solution of one gram per liter, then you can just take 145ml out of this and add it to a 20 gallons tank. that will give you 145mg for 20 gallons.


The tank need to be very clean and no dechlorinator must be use since it will deactivate the PP. In case of emergency while using PP, then you can add dechlorinator and it will deactivate is quickly, so it's quite safe to use. You must watch your fish for 4 hours to make sure they are not gasping for air at the surface. Mine were quite relaxed during the treatment, except one that was breathing fast and that went away on the second treatment.

Good luck with your fishes. I hope they will improve. BTW, if you can rent a microscope or buy or borrow one, try to do a scrape of the mucus and see if you can see any parasite. You would need 400x to see costia, or at least 100x. Lots of reference on the web as to what they look like, lots of video on them at youtube.com too.

Maybe you could identify the cause of this then.

Prazi won't do anything. It did not even do anything for my flukes after nearly a month of treatment when I first got my fish. It was the PP baths that finaly got rid of them (I hope!).

thank you all for your advice. I'm not ready to get "aggressive" with treatment of my discus yet. I only asked the question because if my fish take a big turn for the worst, I'm not prepared to do anything about it. All I have available to me right now is QC, Prazi and salt.... and based on what I'm seeing so far, none are working (although I have not tried Prazi). I'm hoping the QC treatments do the trick. If not, I want to be prepared.

[merk175]

any idea why the water would get so cloudy? When I do a WC obviously it clears up alot but within 16 hours or so it gets very cloudy. Is this from the disease the fish have? Just did a 30% WC and will give them the 3rd dose of QC. Should this be my last dose? Should I be also be using salt in the WC? I haven't added any salt since I began the QC treatments.
the fish look no better now and maybe even worse.....

[Eddie]

thank you all for your advice. I'm not ready to get "aggressive" with treatment of my discus yet. I only asked the question because if my fish take a big turn for the worst, I'm not prepared to do anything about it. All I have available to me right now is QC, Prazi and salt.... and based on what I'm seeing so far, none are working (although I have not tried Prazi). I'm hoping the QC treatments do the trick. If not, I want to be prepared.

Good call, its best not to throw tons of medications at your fish. Some people learn the hard way.

[Roxanne]

any idea why the water would get so cloudy? When I do a WC obviously it clears up alot but within 16 hours or so it gets very cloudy. Is this from the disease the fish have? Just did a 30% WC and will give them the 3rd dose of QC. Should this be my last dose?......

How mature are your filters? How Are you cleaning them out? Can you post all your water parameters? If you are doing a 3 day protocol, then yes, this is the last dose....

Roxanne

[Eddie]

QC can impact your filters if you use too much. As Rox mentioned, a very established/cycled filter won't be affected at all. If your tank/filters are fairly new, you could have kicked them back a bit and you are getting a bacterial bloom. Need to monitor ammonia/nitrite.

Eddie

[Daniella]

I am not surprised.

yes, the fish are shedding lots of mucus and this is what cloud the water. It did the same thing with mine and lots of water change was the only thing to clear it. They will be shedding lots of mucus, they will get thin, very thin.

It's not the biofilter that is knocked down although it probably cannot handle the extra load of all that dead decomposing mucus.

Been there done that. I think a lot of people might give advise on things they have never experienced or had to deal with.

Try another day of Quick cure and if tomorrow they are not better, go with the another treatment because that would mean there is no improvement. With a treatment that works, you would see much quicker results. At least that's what I saw with the PP treatment. Result was very quick.

If the med woudl work, you should see improvement after 2 days, not the fish getting worse. If it is a parasite, then 2 days of med that would work would surely give some releave to the fish and the fish would show sing of recovery. Tomorrow you will know for sure.

Has their tails starting to rot? it might also happen, although it only hapened on 2 of my fish out of 10.

How is the one juvenile that was in the first tank that had this disease? Is it still alive?

any idea why the water would get so cloudy? When I do a WC obviously it clears up alot but within 16 hours or so it gets very cloudy. Is this from the disease the fish have? Just did a 30% WC and will give them the 3rd dose of QC. Should this be my last dose? Should I be also be using salt in the WC? I haven't added any salt since I began the QC treatments.
the fish look no better now and maybe even worse.....