Discus Disasters...help others...

[brewmaster15]

Hi  all,
   A request from all the those  on the discus learning curve  or at the top.  Go back in  those Discus  archives  and find your memories  of your worst  Discus Disaster. Whether it was your fault or someone elses.  You may have lost those fish, but could help others  prevent it.
 
best way to learn they say to experience  it yourself,  but I think learning from others mistakes is less painful!

 My idea, so I guess I'll start....

 4-5 years ago I had a  really nice tank of Domestics I had gotten from Gwynnbrook  as 2" fish .  I was really proud of these fish.  They were perfect and I raised them up to  spawning age , and they were  pairing up.    I got a call from a  local petshop that they had some really nice wilds they just received , and they hadn't even openned  the bags  yet.  I had always wanted  wilds so I drove down  to  see them.  3 Really nice wild blues were there.  They looked really healthy.  I knew about Quarantteens, I always followed them for at least  several  weeks, but I didn't have a tank or room for one at that time. Still These fish were dream fish.  I broke the rules, gave in and bought them. I got them home and gave them a  FORMALIN  bath and  into the tank they went. (cringe)
 Everything was  fine for   the first couple of days. then it happened and  it happened fast.    My Domestics  got hit  with God only knows what. Fish started breathing rapidly, and gills were inflamed. They darkened and died. The time course was fast  2-3 days .I wasn't on the forums  then, so I  relied  books and friends.  I  panicked , I tried everything. I still don't know if I cured the 2 domestics  that survived  out of 10.  Looking back I think it was  Bacterial Gill disease, but who knows. At the time  I had no access  to  scope.  I lost all the wilds as well.
  I have since learned my lesson.  I will NEVER take a shortcut  on my QT again. It is always a minimum 6 weeks, and I pretreat  for external parasites, hexamit, and internal worms, then I use a  cull from  tanks to check the new fish out further.
   Learn from  my mistakes.. Not that I would ever say I told you so! ;D

Hope this helps someone,
al


who's next?

[ChienHsu]

Dear Al:

It is a very good knowledge to me.  At the moment, I have six discus.  But, I will have more for sure.  Can you share the QT procedure with me. like what kind of medicines and the sequence, how long it will take and what is the dose?

Thanks

Chien

[brewmaster15]

Hi Chien,
I'll write it up and post it in the disease board  .
Take care,
al


ps...
 I know  for a fact I'm not the only with painful memories here! Think of this as group therapy....

I had a similar experience with a pair of wild fish I bought. I was in Seattle at a LFS who gets in wilds every year (the only discus he will carry). He had gotten in some Heckles, Manacapura Blues, and some Tefe' Greens.

In the Tefe' tank was the most beautiful wild green discus I had ever seen, nicely color and almost perfect shape. There was also a very dominate "male" in the tank that "she" was hanging with. I assumed they were male and female. I had to have them although I had no room for them at the time. These, too, looked healthy and "clean" so I bought them.

I took them home and put them in a tank with some Green Mambas I bought from Wattley ( I shared this story several times in the past. A Mamba male in that bunch was the nicest discus I had ever seen in person anywhere). 3 - 4 days later - BANG - sick fish, very sick. The Mambas went down hard. The wilds were not much better. I have no idea what it was, but I could not cure it. The female Mambas died after about 2-3 weeks, the wilds died about a week later, and the male Mamba hung on for at least 6 weeks before I put him down. I could no longer wath him suffer and had no hope for a cure. It was the single most stupid thing I have ever done (Pertaining to discus, that is. Believe me, I have done some stupid **** over the years in other areas of my life  : )

So, learning from that experience, and I knew better than that, too, at the time, I have never not QT'd a fish since. That was a lesson for me. I had thought that "even" if the fish had  gotten sick, I could just medicate and all would be cool. WRONG!!

Let a newcomer beware of this story and Al's. I am sure others have had disasters, too.

Mat  :-/

[chuck]

My experience was also with some wilds I purchased at a fish auction a local club was holding. a few days after I introducted them to one of my tanks, my fish started to darken and white slime started to fall off their bodies, my fish looked exacatlly like the photos that Dave Clubine has on his website.  The wilds looked great while all this was going on. To top it off I used the same hoses to do water changes on my other tanks before this outbreak happened. Within 10 days all 5 tanks were infected.  It lasted about 4 weeks  and at the end I lost 24 adult fish and 2 tanks of fry. took me over 1 year to get my tanks back to normal, Now I clorox everything and I keep my new fish seperated until they reach adult size before I mix them.
I couldn't tell you how i cured it, cause I used everything I could get my hands on (To say I was in PANIC mode is a understatment!)I tried Ampicillian, heat, metafix,salt,Formalin. that was about 3 years ago and It still makes me sick thinking of how simple it might have been to prevent.
chuck

Ok Guys..... mine's not quite as dramatic... I hate those hard lessons learned

I bought a used 45 gal high tank... was hoping to use it for a breeding pair. Well it had lizards in it before I bought it   I guess you can see where this is going  :

I brought the tank in the house filled it up and hey! no leaks after 2 days..... I added my filters and heater....  waited a few more days, all seemed to be fine...... I then added probably 150 - 200 small angelfish to grow out in for awhile. Next morning I had baby angelfish everywhere..... the tank had split down the front side  

Not only did I have that mess to deal with..... I had to break other tanks down that were in the same room because they were all on 1 long tank stand..... grrrrrr...

Man.....  45 gals of water in the carpet is not a pretty sight  :

ok.....  call me a dummy   I then decided, it can't be too tuff to recaulk the tank right  ??? Well .... I recaulked the tank and had no problems. I managed to get a spawn from my pair of Discus and raised a few of their fry in there...... Next thing you know..... like an idiot I moved the tank to the living room and it started leaking..... went through the same process of recaulking it......

I then set it up again in my living room no more problems ..... until ..... I broke it down yesterday evening and moved it again, this time to the master bedroom. Well this morning I noticed a leak  

I guess it's time to give up on caulking that DA#@ tank  

-----> Beth's not a Happy Camper Right Now  

[Discusgeo]

My dumbest distater was not paying attention to what I was doing in my fishroom. One afternoon while doing water changes I notice that one tank needed cleaning more than the one I had planned on. The one I was suppose to do contained 10 Pigeon Bloods around 18 months old. Now these guys had started to do the make love to me dance for the last week so each day I was adding R.O water to the tank to soften it up. Well getting sidetracked I went and drained another tank full of youngsters and filled there tank full of water. *What I forgot to do was change the valve from the R.O tanks to the tap water tanks and I killed about 25 youngs guys with R.O water because the Ph went from 8 to about 5, water hadness from 600ppm to 4 ppm in a matter of minutes. You see after I change the water I went back into the house and didn't go back outside until feeding time. I will let you guess what part of the tank they were floating in, instead of swimming in the middle. Anyway I change my water setup and they are both separate now, I learned real quick on rapid Ph changes as I took a bunch of beautiful Discus to the trash can.
George

See, we all do dumb stuff from time to time.    : :

Mat  ;D

[brewmaster15]

Thanks for the replies  so far.  I'm really hoping those who haven't made our mistakes yet- won't!

-al

Well lets see, My biggest mistake had to do with a tank full of fry and a heater. I was needing some more room for some fry so I set up another tank, filled it up with aged water and tossed in an already cycled sponge. I grabbed a extra heater that I had laying around and put it in the tank. Next in goes about 100 3 week old fry.
Then I became busy doing other fish room chores when I remembered I had not plugged in the heater so without checking the heater reading I just plugged it in................Can you see where this is going............. Well I didnt check on the tank for the rest of the day wanting the fry to get settled in to their new tank....Awoke the nexted morning to a tank full of cooked fry.....I had used a heater way bigger than I should of for that size of tank and the heater was set as high as it would go because I had used it in a tank that I was treating some fish in......Oh well we live and learn, you can bet I check the heaters now............Randy

[Ardan]

Well the biggest mistake (I have made many), was about 10 yrs ago. I had about 8 aquariums going. 1 with some pretty decent discus from an lfs, 1 tank with oscars, 1 with tetras, 1 with gouramis.........
Anyway, I started feeding blackworms from the lfs to all the fish.(I bought new worms every couple of wks) All was fine for 1 or 2 months and then,
Discus started scratching, had white spots on sides.
Oscars had slimy white feces, some type of worm on the skin.
Fish started to die.
I examined the blackworms and found a couple of louse, I examined under a microscope the oscar feces and saw what I thought to be capillaria eggs, I saw under the microscope what I thought to be flukes from the discus.
I went to the lfs, they said the blackworms came from a goldfish farm, where they grew the worms in the goldfish droppings. That batch of worms had died.
Anyway, I started to treat with dylox, then I switched to fluke tabs, then I switched to formalin in the tank of discus, sterilize another tank and transfer.
The oscars were given hexamit,(does not work with capillaria, I now know) but they started to die off. Switched to clout, went from 5 oscars to 1. The 1 developed fungus, very bad. Tried salt, dyes, tetracycline. Eventually put him down.
DIscus, started with 5 , ended up with I think 2.
Lost all other fish except a few tetras and  a few corys I believe. It wasn't long after that I took a break from the hobby.
There weren't any forums for help, the folks at the lfs had never dealt with all of that, especially not all at once.
I did learn a lot. But at the time it was a real roller coaster and a bad experience. i don't know what came from the worms, or what diseases "flared up" because of stress to the fish.
Now I say  that is why I became more interested in the sciences of the hobby, because of that experience. So now I know a little more and maybe I can help someone with that bit of knowledge.
btw I now feed blackworms again, from a good source and I take extra precautions, such as rinsing for a week before using, and deworming every month.
Ardan

ps I have also lost fish from not understanding the nitrogen cycle and adding fish too fast, before the tank was even cycled.(mistakes early on in the hobby)


The greatest thing I have learned recently, is that there are many people with lots of knowledge and experiences, all willing to share and help, right here!!

I've had them all. Just name it. The worse disaster I had was knocking over a 4L. jar of Muriatic acid ( HCL) into my overcrowded 150 gal. show tank by a visitor and was too embarrass to tell me until it's too late. "NEVER" place any med. or chemical on top of aquarium.
JimmyL

[scotz]

Well I guess I can post my dumbest mistake - 21 years ago when I just started breeding angelfish I had put my best pair in a 20 gal. tank and since I was out of room I had to put the tank on the bottom shelf of the bookcase I had just made. My daughter, Rachael, was just 1 at the time, and she always watched me change water, etc. with the fish. One day when I was at work she managed to turn the heater all the way up (These were the days before submergable heaters) and cooked my best pair. I was heartbroken for weeks. I still to this day don't know how she managed to do that since those heaters were hard to turn and my wife was in constant supervision of her, but my wife says my daughter was looking at the fish when she was making lunch. I sometimes tease my daughter about her fish cooking skills!! By the way, Rachael, is my only child out of 3 who is into keeping fish!

scotz

[Denny]

mine has to do with a magnum h.o.t

about 3 mos ago i was polishing my tank and it was late and i was torn between getting much needed sleep and polishing more. i use the vacuum attachment so i can get every square inch. i decided to leave the filter on all night to really clean things up.

when i came down in the morning i noticed the filter making a strange noise. unfortunately the noise was a 1.5" snakeskin that must have swam up the tube and got stuck and was dead.


the worst part is that because of the towns water problems and my h.o.t breaking down, my h2o quality went down and when my new h.o.t was delivered the other day and the tank needed more polishing i looked at the fish and decided that since the smallest fish in the tank was over 2.5" that there was no way that it could happen again. i don't have to tell you what i saw when i came down to the tank the next morning-  my wifes last fish, a blue cobalt was stuffed in the tube. and this time i had taken the precaution to stick the tube in the bottom corner so that a fish couldn't accidently get caught. they must be attracted by the current and swim right up.

wife is pretty bummed. it was the last fish of 4 that i bought her for mothers day. one blue neon had a problem getting food and wasted away. another one along with a cobalt got a bug of some sort that took them out.

lessons learned
denny

[Carol_Roberts]

Let's see, my most gruesome incident was similiar to Denny's.  

I was still in my fancy goldfish days and had a gorgeous calico black moor (with the protruding eyes). I left the room during a water change and when I returned he was stuck in the gravel tube. I had to bang on the tube to get him loose and he lost an eye as he dropped back into the tank. It was like a horrible, fright movie with blood coming out of his empty eye socket.  I put him in a Q-tank with Furan 2 and he lived.  The eye socket filled in with tissue and he rejoined the other goldfish. I'm amazed at how tough fish are.  I've picked Koi up off the ground and thrown them back in the pond and they've lived.

I've had a 135 gallon tank crack the front glass. . . .

I didn't get all the bleach out after cleaning my change water barrel and had discus turn pale, gasping at the top for air while I madly dashed thru the house putting all 14 or 16 into the 55 gallon that hadn't had a water change. . . .

Then there are the annoying ones, like coming home to a pool of brineshrimp on  your dresser or forgetting to turn the filter back on . . .

Carol