Help my sturgeon won't feed!!

[fishboy123]

Hello so i have had a small sturgeon in my pond for a while and he has been fine swimming around but hasn't been eating the sturgeon food I put in and today i seen him laying at the bottom not moving!! I thought he was dead and tried to net him out but he then swam away but he looked like he was struggling to swim. Please help I don't want him to die!!

 

[Fresh2o]

You should provide more info such as pond size, size of the sturgeon, other inhabitants, filter type and turnover, other forms of aeration, water parameters.

 

[fishboy123]

The pond is 10ft across and 4ft deep. Holds about 600gals it has 6 common goldfish, 3 koi and 4 wether loaches in it. Have no idea what the water parameters but all the other fish seem ok. It is winter at the moment so all of the fish are not active.the filter is turning over 300litres per hour. The sturgeon is about 6 inches and he looks like he is starting to bend because he is not eating the pellets I put in for him so he is becoming malnourished.

 

[Fresh2o]

If it is winter then perhaps you should not be feeding any of the fish. When I had a pond with goldfish and koi (10'x12'x2' deep ~1500g) I would stop feeding when the temp got below 50F. They would not get food for about 4-5 months.
For goldfish and koi I believe the enzymes they use for breaking down and digesting food would not be active due to the low temperatures. So they would eat but not process the food. That contributed to the nutrient/waste level on the pond. Not sure if the same applies to sturgeon. I understand that inadequate feeding will cause defects as you have described.
The filter throughput seems a bit low.

 

[fishboy123]

I have read that sturgeon should be feed all year round but it is still strange how he has only just started to do this. I have stopped putting food in for the koi now and only put sturgeon pellets in

 

[fishboy123]

I will be getting a bigger filter when I get the money

 

[fishboy123]

Is there any way I can save him

 

[Andy Sager]

I would try to put the fish into an separate aquarium and use a different food ( something more natural to the fish, such as worms or snails or shrimps ) to see if it's a food issue or a fish issue. Because it is a small fish, he may not be willing to eat a prepared diet just yet and is slowly starving himself instead of eating that food. Another possibility is that the food itself may be contaminated which is why he is not eating it. The only way to know is to watch him eat something else then reject the prepared food.
2 things to keep in mind however, 1- I am using the pronoun "He" generically as it could be a female as well but writing "He/She" is a lot of typing and 2- since there is already a curving of the spine as you noted, it may be too late for this fish. There is no way of knowing for sure however so it is worth the effort to try to save it. (IMO) (Should this fish not survive and you replace it with another one, it would be worth trying an alternative diet to this prepared food to see if that was the issue with this fish.)

Hope it all works out.

 

[fishboy123]

This is a picture of him

 

[Andy Sager]

View attachment 291343
This is a picture of him

This doesn't change my answer but I will say that that curve is not a typical curve due to starvation or consumption. But if he's not eating, you need to find out why.

 

[Goldguru]

a sturgen that size would already be in a stream with strong/medium current they require fast water to breath properly,my guess is a low oxygen problem

Cages are attached at pontoons in the water unit (Figure 114), where current
velocity amounts to 0.2–0.5 m/s. The water temperature in the unit should not be
higher than 26–28 °C. Only short- term (1–2 d) temperature elevation up to 30°C
is permissible.

source

http://www.fao.org/docrep/017/i2144e/i2144e.pdf

chapt 10 & 11. C 12 deals with diseases