Molly with a bent spine

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Suebhonee

Aquarium Advice Newbie
Joined
Jul 13, 2003
Messages
2
Location
virginia
My molly looks as though his spine is bent. He is not swimming real well. His stomach also looks caved in. He is still eating but spends a lot of time at the bottom of the tank. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
 
How new is the tank? Do you know the water parameters (ammonia, pH, nitrites etc..)? If not I would suggest buying a test kit from you fish store or take a water sample in to most stores like petsmart or petco etc...and they generally do free water tests. It sounds like what happened last year when I put 3 guppies in an uncycled tank. They got bent spines and had a lot of trouble swimming, which is ammonia and nitrite problems.
 
The tank is not that new. It has been going since February. All of the other fish look good. My other Molly is healthy. I did notice that the sick one has a more whiter poop coming out. I have read some information that that might be a sign of parasites. Is that true? Thanks for the advice.
 
If it is parasites then raising the tank temp to 85F (slowly of course) and adding some salt to the water should help. The salt kills the parasites (and Molly like a little salt anyway) and the higher temp speeds up the life cycle of the parasite from the normal weeks to a few days. This raise shouldn't hurt the other fish. A quarantine tank would be best but there is a chance that you r other fish may have caught the parasite already but just aren't showing signs or were stronger hardier fish to begin with. You can buy aquarium salt for fresh water that serves this purpose.
 
Yes, i have a dwarf gourami in an uncycled tank who is now exhibiting these EXACT symptoms. :cry:
I tried putting salt in the tank (1tbsp per gallon), and the temperature is at 82-3 degrees. I think he is going to die.
I'm not sure why your molly has a parasite since you don't have a new tank. Did you recently add some new fish?
Im just feeling guilty about my gourami. I bought him a whole tank for himself because there were aggression problems with the gourami in my 10 gallon. I couldn't force myself to bring them back to the horrendous conditions of the petco across the street (not all petcos are bad, but the one that i live across the street from is NOT a good one). i had no idea what the nitrogen cycle was when all this occurred. Otherwise, i would just have waited until the tank had finished cycling to add fish, even though it takes for *******ever for a tank to complete its first cycle. The gourami in my 10 gallon is doing fine, but I guess he is just naturally stronger. Wow, sorry to ramble on about this for so long. I am going to give this subject its own post.
 
CORRECTION: i only put 1tablespoon per FIVE gallons. just in case anyone reads this in the future, i don't want them to be confused. 1tbspn per gallon is much too much.
 
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