Help, One dead Balloon molly and a strange acting Lyretail

[William]

My moms tank, She has a Balloon molly that just died and a lyretail molly thats acting very strange.


it started with the golden Balloon yesterday, where we found it sitting in the corner of the tank on the floor. We nudged him out and he continued on acting normal, feeding and everything else.

Today i found him dead on the bottom, and when I took him out I noticed the Lyretail was acting very strange, swimming around erraticly and rubbing the sides of its body against rocks in the tank and such.


What could be happening? please, I don't want ot loose anymore mollies...

 

[William]

oh, and levels are fine.

Amonia is 0, Nittrite 0, PH between 7.0 and 7.2

 

[William]

bump..

This is my moms tank and her fish, and it really broke her up bad that the gold Balloon died, and shes really worried about her speckled lyretail..

 

[Allivymar]

Its hard to give an exact diagnosis as you well know William, but there is some sort of irritant in the tank (otherwise that lyretail wouldn't be flashing and scratching). I wonder if they have a parasite? Or if some chemical got into the water?

 

[William]

Definate no on the chemicals.

and I don't know ohw they could have gotten a parasite..

The tank was clean, and last added fish was two weeks ago..

 

[William]

Its beeing very twitchy.


Constantly swimming back and forth, or moving around in erratic bursts of speed.


The back and forth thing, its also doing that against the heater. Its not eating anything off the heater, its just continually bumping into it.


Someone please help, I can't stand to see this look on my mom..

 

[Allivymar]

Its near impossible to say what it is William, you know that.

If she added new fish 2 weeks ago, and did not QT them, theres a good chance one of them brought an infection or parasite into the tank. But without a specific diagnosis its near impossible to treat; what works for one will not work for the other and may wind up hurting the fish more if we're wrong. Check out here: http://www.fishpalace.org/Disease.html and here: www.fish-disease.com (although it seems to be down atm) to see if anything matches what you and your mom are seeing.

 

[William]

It dosn't match anything on the first site..

 

[jsoong]

This may just be a stab in the dark, but my goldie acted somewhat like your molly when it had ich. It was swimming irractically, with a twisting motion, and trying to rub its body against the gravel, side of tank,etc.

I did lots of searching in the goldie sites (eg. koivet.com), and at least in koi & goldies, the most common cause of flashing is ich, even when spots are not seen. (Apparently, you never see ich spots in koi, or in the early stages of ich...) Other parasites may also cause the same thing.

I did manage to see ich spots on mine so the diagnosis is fairly straight forward, but maybe you can look carefully at all the fish to see if there is anything. Also, if you still have the dead fish, it may be worthwhile to carefully look at its skin & gills (with a magnifying glass even ... the koi sites suggests taking scrapings & looking with a microscope!).

Good luck with your fish.

 

[William]

I have an Ich Medicine, should I go ahead and treat the tank even if I don't see anything?

 

[William]

Its a black and white speckled lyretail molley, So its hard to tell..

but I think I saw ich spots on it, so I went ahead and treated the tank