Darkening Discus

[DiscusLoverJeff]

Hello friends,

I just arrived home from work and noticed that half of my F1's Cuipeau Discus are huddled in a corner and turned dark in color. The other half seem to be fine.


DISEASE QUESTIONNAIRE


Problem

1. Please explain the problems with your fish/when and how they started

Half of my F1's Cuipeau Discus are huddled in a corner and turned dark in color. The other half seem to be fine.
2. Symptoms (i.e. turning dark, excess slime, not eating, clamped fins, flashing, darting, clamped gills, white/yellow/green poop, hiding, headstanding or tailstanding, white on tips of fins, rotting or fungus, blisters/ white zits on fish, bloated, cloudy eyes, wounds)



Turning Dark, possible rapid breathing,


3. What medications/ treatments that you have already tried and results. Include dosages and duration of treatment.


None at this point.


Tank/Water

4. Tank size and age, number and size of fish

90 Gallon tank, 3 years old, 8 discus, 6 cories, 4 plecos

5. Water change regime/ how long has tank been running/ bare bottom or gravel/ do you age your water?

Water changed 60% every 3 days. PFS bottom, some potted plants.

6 Parameters and water source;

- temp ____84_

- ph ___6.8__

- ammonia reading _0___

- nitrite reading __0__

- nitrate reading __0__

- well water _NO___

- municipal water _YES___

7. Any new fish/plants added recently

No new plants or fish.

Filtration Fluval 405 and Marineland 400. TDS 170. RO/Tap mix 80/20

I have the following medications available. Furan 2, Maracyn Plus, Maracyn 2, Metro, MB, PP and Prazipro

[jimg]

no changes in anything or problems noticed in the last few weeks?
got to watch them real close for any more symptoms. Double check all water parameters, filters, bad food etc. no meds yet.... if they continue I would start with qc

[4discus]

If they are still eating and everything else appears normal other than they are dark and staying to the corner .... anything that could have spooked some of them while your at work? Noises, shadows etc. Are they huddled at the top like they need more oxygen? Im not familiar on RO so maybe someone can verify thats good. Unless someone else has additional thoughts IMO I would just watch for additional symptoms for the next few days at this point.

[ExReefer]

Are you doing WC's direct from tap? I know we both live near each other. If I do large WC's this time of year, my discus get stressed. And by large, I mean anything over 30%. I have to do lots of smaller WC's this time of year to avoid problems or age my water. I also siphon the bottom daily. In the summer, I can do 70-80% changes without issue.

[Keith Perkins]

Think I'd consider a dose of PP.

[DiscusLoverJeff]

Never run straight water. I age my water routinely for 24 to 48 hours. All aged water parameters are checked daily for consistancy. Nothing to spook them as the surroundings have not changed. Feeding is monitored as I do not let food sit any longer than needed. They may not be eating right now. I fed them last night and the only ones eating were the 4 that had good color.

All water parameters in the tank were fine again this morning before work.

Keith, doing a PP dip on the tank sounds like an idea. Since it is a 90 gal, and the mix is now made into liquid form should I dose the standard 2 drops per gallon?

[TURQ64]

FWIW, I've had trouble with F1 Cuipeau's turning off and on dark, hiding, etc. repeatedly. So, I treated them as if they had Cryptobia, and they are doing fine for the first time in months....this is a tuff nut to crack. I suggest reading up on how other secondaries keep returning due to the flagellate. If they are in that boat, mortality is @ 50% if they are heavily infected before treatment. Dimetridazole.

[Keith Perkins]

Keith, doing a PP dip on the tank sounds like an idea. Since it is a 90 gal, and the mix is now made into liquid form should I dose the standard 2 drops per gallon?

That would be my approach, but if I had wilds I'd be paying a lot of attention to the folks who actually keep wilds advise too.

[jimg]

i only use pp as a dip in a separate tank to "clean" them off somewhat before other treatments, then I put them into a new more sterile tank. if I want to treat what I think may be external parasites/protozoans and keep them in their original tank then I treat the whole tank with qc.
pp will not kill off the pests in a working tank as formalin will. if it did the entire bio system, tank and fish would be dead. imo it's good for lowering dissolved organics and stripping the slimecoat from the fish, that's it.
I have learned myself to head for a salt dip and/or qc over pp any day.
that is what I find works best for me anyway.

[DiscusLoverJeff]

Unfortunetly for me all my tanks are filled at the moment. My last QT I had to use for a pair of plecos.

I will check their status of the F1's this evening when I get home from work and go from there. If need be, I can move the plecos but the female is hiding in the cave right now and male is standing guard.

[Second Hand Pat]

Jeff, if Gary is r ight it will be all internal. Honestly I have had similar issues with my F1s and am still having off and on darkening issues. I am running a flub treatment on them now and am considering running the treatment course I did under the "Very Suddenly Sick" thread.

[DiscusLoverJeff]

Thanks Pat, 41 pages in a thread is a lot to go through.

I have the following medications available. Furan 2, Maracyn Plus, Maracyn 2, Metro, MB, PP and Prazipro and from reading a few threads, I will start with Metro and see what happens.

[Second Hand Pat]

Jeff, try the PP first. It only takes a couple of hours. I will tackle that monster thread but want to check with Gary first.

[Discus Origins]

Jeff, sent you a pm. Before assuming there are parasites to treat observe the group for a few days and see any changes in behavior. I have 10 of the F1s that I kept for future breeding and they are all 5-6" and healthy. At any given time due to the fighting for hierarchy there is 1 or 2 out of the 10 which appear darker than others, and then it changes to other fish that might be darker depending on mood. When I put food in there the dark ones turn light again and eat like pigs, I do 90% WC on them everyday. I have not lost any of the F1s and I have had them since they were wigglers.

Could be a possibility with tap water source issues or stress. If you see them off food, bad poop or very heavy breathing on the same fish over a couple days straight then I would suspect possible pathogens.

[TURQ64]

I suggest you read this, digest it, and then think of your course of action before putting any meds in the tank. That will eleminate any possible cross medication issue.
This is an article by John Nicholson. As one old A$$hole to another, I appologize John, for high grading your material, but I do believe in the fish getting a fighting chance...

CRYPTOBIA – THE SILENT MENACE
By John Nicholson
This is a sordid tale involving love, murder and betrayal. The evil arises from a villain named Cryptobia. It is an evil that is often misdiagnosed. He hides in darkness while his deeds are often blamed on others………

It all started when I decided to add some new breeding stock to my discus hatchery. I brought in 13 adults/young adults. I quarantined them in a 75 gallon tank filled with aged tap water at 84 degrees and 2 cycled sponge filters. I added 2 tablespoons of salt per 10 gallons as a precaution. I added in three 2.5 to 3 inch juveniles from my own stock which had never been exposed to the outside world. The fish were fed my homemade beef heart mixture and received a 50% water change daily.

After 8 weeks everything looked perfect. None of the fish had showed any sign of illness. I had a pair form in this tank. During this initial bonding/spawning cycle the rest of the fish in the tank were continually harassed and run to one end of the tank. During this a couple of the fish started showing signs of Hex. I figured it was due to the stress and did not worry much about it. I moved the pair to a breeding tank and the “hex” fish to a treatment tank.

I raised the temp in the treatment tank to 90 degrees with a single sponge filter. I treated with 400 mg of metro per 10 gallons of water a total of four times. After the initial treatment I waited 8 hours, changes 50% of the water and added the second dose. The third does was added 24 hours after the second and the forth was added 24 hours after the third. After treatment the fish started eating normally again and everything seemed corrected, but after a couple of weeks they were showing signs again. I treated them again which lead to a temporary remission of the symptoms.

As a discus breeder I don’t always get as attached to the fish as others might and I was ready to get rid of this “hex” problem so I treated the fish with a double dose of metro and carried the treatment out for a full week. The fish looked like death for a couple of weeks and then started eating with a vengeance. All of the earlier signs of illness (stringy feces, shyness, grouping together, and hanging in the corners of the tank) were gone. Over just a couple of days the fish rebounded to perfect heath. Life was great except that the hex had seemed to have crept into several other tanks.

While this was happening the pair that I had earlier moved into the breeding tank raised a clutch of 154 fry. I separated the fry 3 weeks after they went free swimming. I had picked up some of these fish for the purpose of crossing them into a red turquoise line of my own so I decided to pull out this male and swap him with a suspected male from a 75 gallon tank with 10 eighteen month old red turquoise fish of my own and a red snakeskin female from one of my pairs. I needed a place to put this original male so of course I tossed him in the 75 gallon tank the new male had been pulled from.

I mix fish around in my tanks all of the time. When I do this I will often see some aggression but it will be short lived. This time the aggression was fairly excessive but I had no doubt that it would subside before I returned from work.

When I got home that evening I discovered that I had been sadly mistaken about the aggression subsiding. The new male was not only dead but his eyes were missing. I have never seen discus do this before. I removed the dead male and also decided to move the female snakeskin back in with her mate.

In less then a week all of the remaining fish in the 75 gallon tank were very ill. The female snakeskin and her mate were also both very ill. I tried several treatments including furan2, tetracycline, erythromycin, and salt. One day they might look a little better and then next they would look worse. This pattern continued as they slowly lost ground. The reoccurring hex problem also continued in my other tanks. It was at this time that I decided to send in 3 specimens to Dr. Varner.

This was one of my better decisions in a long time. Two of the specimens were “healthy” fish from a couple of different tanks (both of which had had bouts of reoccurring hex) and the only remaining live fish from the 75 gallon tank (I had also lost the snakeskin pair) By this time the sick individual was suffering from a host of what Dr. Varner called “secondary opportunistic aquatic bacterial pathogens”. I have a hunch that many of the fish that die from cryptobiosis are mistakenly determined to have died from one of the many secondary infections that Cryptobia hides behind.

I was very lucky that Dr. Varner had noticed some “lightly encapsulated granulomas with amorphous necrotic center” and also “lymphocytes, histocytes, melanomacrophages, and rare multinucleated giant cells”. Instead of just letting it go she spend the next couple of weeks doing all kind of test. She also discovered these granulomas in the spleen, liver, caudal kidney, and heart. The brains were unaffected. It is very hard to diagnosis chronic cryptobiosis but Dr. Varner was reasonably certain that it was the root cause of problem.

The fact that the two “healthy” fish had the same abnormalities was what clued me into what I had been seeing in my tanks. It was not reoccurring hex that I had been chasing, but Cryptobia. This parasite was slowly weakening the fish. In the beginning there are normally no signs, but if the fish gets stressed they can show the normal signs of hex (stringy feces and loss of appetite). If somehow caught at this stage, it can be treated successfully with metro.

Since at this stage I was still uneducated in this disease, I did not know the exact dosage. To get rid of it I treated in what I call a “strong and long” formation. Do so at you own risk. Once the problem has been around for awhile metro will not cure the problem. A product called dimetridazole (trade name Emtryl or Unizole). I used 100grams of product will treat 330 gallons of water. You will need to treat for 3 concessive days. This means that 100 grams is enough to fully treat (3 days) 110 gallons of water. The containers that I received came with a plastic scoop. I determined that there were exactly 33 scoops in 100 grams. This made the dosage easy. 1 scoop per 10 gallons of water once a day for 3 days. This is not an easy product to find anymore, but I was able to find out that it is still widely used in the world of racing pigeons. A search of pigeon supplies and a few phone calls should lead you to the product.

I observed some interesting developments during treatment. The tanks that I knew had been exposed all turned cloudy after the first treatment. They clouded to the point that I could not see a breeding pair in a 29 gallon tank. I had to add some extra aeration but otherwise the fish were unstressed and started eating better after the first treatment. Some tanks that I felt were “clean” stayed crystal clear. The tanks had the same water parameters and dosage level. I do not know exactly what that means but thought it was worthy of noting.

I also notice that if you get interrupted while medicating the tanks and accidentally double treat a tank you will have a death rate of approximately 70%. To make matters worse this was one of the “clean” tanks that I was just treating for my own piece of mind.

These were the only deaths that I experienced during treatment. At the time the smallest fry that I treated were about one inch. The only tank I had not treated was a pair with eggs. Based on the success of the other tanks I have now started treatment on this pair. The fry are only 10 days old but after the initial treatment they are not showing any signs of stress.

In conclusion I feel that many people, just like myself, have been treating the symptoms but not the root problem of the “recurring hex” illness. Without stress, your fish can live with Cryptobia for many months without any symptoms. With proper care these fish are able to spawn and raise young with just a slight reduction in success rates. When the fish do breakdown we often blame the secondary conditions for the deaths that we see. Even if you send in a fish for a pathology report it can easily be missed. The good news is it appears to be completely curable with the right medication and the treatment appears to be easy on the fish. I hope that the exposure of this menace can lead more people to successful discus keeping.

Note from the author: The above article is based on my personal experience and a pathology report from Patricia W. Varner, DVM, PhD, AFS/FHS – Certified Fish Pathologist

[DiscusLoverJeff]

Very good information Gary, thank you for sharing this in this thread for others to grasp.

I found another little tid-bit on the topic of Dimetridazole.

http://forum.simplydiscus.com/showthread.php?42830-Dimetridazole

Can't find a supplier online. Anyone know of a place to purchase this product?

[TURQ64]

And along this line.......

http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/vm077

[DiscusLoverJeff]

Well 1 of the 4 has improved but still have 3 dark and in the corner. I will do an 80% water change tomorrow and see how they look.

[TNT77]

Very good information Gary, thank you for sharing this in this thread for others to grasp.

I found another little tid-bit on the topic of Dimetridazole.

http://forum.simplydiscus.com/showthread.php?42830-Dimetridazole

Can't find a supplier online. Anyone know of a place to purchase this product?
http://www.jedds.com/-strse-521/CANKEREX-dsh-PLUS-50-g-%28Medpet%29/Detail.bok

[DiscusLoverJeff]

Well friends, 3 of the wilds are still dark and not eating the 4th dark one that appered better is not eating either.

What should be the next course of action?

[Keith Perkins]

i only use pp as a dip in a separate tank to "clean" them off somewhat before other treatments, then I put them into a new more sterile tank. if I want to treat what I think may be external parasites/protozoans and keep them in their original tank then I treat the whole tank with qc.
pp will not kill off the pests in a working tank as formalin will. if it did the entire bio system, tank and fish would be dead. imo it's good for lowering dissolved organics and stripping the slimecoat from the fish, that's it.
I have learned myself to head for a salt dip and/or qc over pp any day.
that is what I find works best for me anyway.

I tend to agree more with the following: http://bidka.org/pp1.shtml I've had very good luck with it, as has Jason K.

[jimg]

I tend to agree more with the following: http://bidka.org/pp1.shtml I've had very good luck with it, as has Jason K.

PP works by oxidising the organics in the tank and is indiscriminate, so will happily oxidise the bog wood as well as any bugs we are trying to kill
This is my doubt, if it is indiscriminate why would it just kill flukes/bugs but not bacteria?
I have used it for flukes alone and scoped to see flukes still present. imo if it is strong enough to kill flukes deep in the gills, it will harm the gills too and anything else good.
like i said it is imo good for cleaning the fish and some d.o. but many meds are designed to treat thing specifically

[pcsb23]

This is my doubt, if it is indiscriminate why would it just kill flukes/bugs but not bacteria?
I have used it for flukes alone and scoped to see flukes still present. imo if it is strong enough to kill flukes deep in the gills, it will harm the gills too and anything else good.
like i said it is imo good for cleaning the fish and some d.o. but many meds are designed to treat thing specificallyIt will kill bacteria if that bacteria is exposed to it, i.e. on the surface of the animal or tank or in the water column. PP is far more aggressive than Formalin or F&MG too. Unlike F&MG there is no harmful build up in the fishes organs, nor is it carcinogenic. On the other hand if you blow a dose you can kill the fish (but that is true of F&MG too). Your argument re flukes deep in the gills isn't quite correct either, the same will hold true for F&MG too. Both F&MG and PP are indiscriminate, neither give a rats about what they nuke, if it is organic they have a go at nuking it!

I am not sure how this debate is helping Jeff resolve his problems though so moving on ;) ...

Jeff, without sacrificing a fish and having it examined by a path vet it will be difficult to know if cryptobia is the culprit or not. Some internal parasites leave traces in the fishes faeces which can be seen using a 'scope, I am not 100% sure if cryptobia does or does not, but it would be very difficult to id given their size and that they are very similar to spiro ... I have seen flagellates in faeces though. External parasite are much easier to see with a 'scope. Of course if you don't have a 'scope ....

As for how to proceed, well one thing is for sure using PP you will see fairly quick results if you were to go that route, and 2ppm would be fine. I will sometimes use a once off treatment of PP before commencing other treatments e.g. a metro treatment. As for follow up, difficult call really as this could just as easily be a nematode infection as a flagellate one or some other bacterial infection. I'd be tempted to try something like levimasole before using metro.

[DiscusLoverJeff]

Thanks everyone for the advice. I tried salt as recommended and I will check the fish continuously over the weekend. Salt can take up to 10 days to see results so I may just let it run its course before adding the PP unless both can be done at the same time?

But after reading Josie's thread about her issue, I seen that running 2 treatments was not advisable.

[jimg]

I am not sure how this debate is helping Jeff resolve his problems though so moving on pp was suggested and I was giving my thoughts on why I would choose salt or qc over pp. My thing about the flukes deep in the gills is pp is usually 4-6 hrs,f&mg are min 3 days is what I do anyway. to me if I left pp at 2ppm for 3 days if it lasted, everything would be dead.
was just my opinion:)

[pcsb23]

Jeff, I am not a fan of using salt for long term baths. ime it is no longer as effective as it once was. The only time I will use salt for extended baths is if there is a risk of dehydration (yep I'm serious) or of NO2.

Salt dips on the other hand remain effective, and these can be combined with other meds, i.e. dip the fish then place in a pretreated aquarium with the med of choice.

[pcsb23]

pp was suggested and I was giving my thoughts on why I would choose salt or qc over pp. My thing about the flukes deep in the gills is pp is usually 4-6 hrs,f&mg are min 3 days is what I do anyway. to me if I left pp at 2ppm for 3 days if it lasted, everything would be dead.
was just my opinion:)Jim, I'm not having a go, but again you need to understand how f&mg work, after a few hours it is spent, the formalin will have off gassed or have been used and the mg will have been used. And for the record I have treated discus daily with 2ppm PP, though there are better methods imo.

[DiscusLoverJeff]

Thanks everyone. I am home now from work and 3 are still the same and not eating. The salt has now been in the tank for 24 hours. Is it recommended to do a water change soon and then replenish the salt?

[pcsb23]

Thanks everyone. I am home now from work and 3 are still the same and not eating. The salt has now been in the tank for 24 hours. Is it recommended to do a water change soon and then replenish the salt?Jeff, water changes are rarely if ever a bad idea :)

As for the salt and treatment, it is your call, you have to make a plan and at least give that plan a chance to work, be it long term salt baths, qc, pp or whatever. If you do decide to stick with the salt get it up to at least 2gram/litre and better still 3grams/litre (but definitely not higher than that!). In US units I think it is 2.7 ounces to the gallon up to 4 ounces to the gallon ... but I only really think in metric and imperial measurements :o

[DiscusLoverJeff]

Thanks Paul very much. very informative.

[jimg]

Jim, I'm not having a go, but again you need to understand how f&mg work, after a few hours it is spent, the formalin will have off gassed or have been used and the mg will have been used. And for the record I have treated discus daily with 2ppm PP, though there are better methods imo.Hey Paul I trust your judgment/experience a lot more than mine, after all you are the one I got the pp treatment from! I'm just giving my thoughts on what I have encountered with it so don't take it the wrong way.