Sick fish: fungus, maybe? And can't get rid of nitrites.

[fidodido]

Hiya, two questions:

I have a dying blue dwarf gourami. About a week ago, I noticed a small white patch was forming on its body. Fearing ich, I turned up the temp to about 87 degrees and added a bit of salt to the water. It seemed to help get rid of the growth for a while. But the gourami looked like something ate away at its scales, as it has a somewhat bare patch where the growth was. I've given up on it now as it is barely moving and listless. We've isolated it from the tank. And now that I examine it in its little container, I can see the growth has increased quite a bit and is now looking almost cottony or hairlike. I thought it was just a little patch, but under a flashlight, I can see it thins out but is actually about 2 mm from the fish's body.

Can anyone help me determine what it is? I'm assuming it's fungal rather than bacterial considering its growth. My wife bought some Maracyn and put that into the tank.

My main concern is treating the tank before we lose another fish.

My other big concern is nitrite levels. I've been testing our water and it is currently at 7.2 pH (used to be 6.4...I'm not sure how I got it to be so basic). The ammonia levels have dropped from 2 ppm to 0. But my nitrite levels have remained at 5 ppm. Or so I'm guessing. The whole color chart thing is a bit hard to tell if it's 2 or 5 ppm or somewhere in between.

Whoops, sorry, forgot the other important stuff...29 Gallon tank, aquatic soil base, 4-5 live plants. Lighting is too low...am working on remedying that. 3 platys, 1 dwarf gourami (still ok), 1 albino cory, 2 zebra danios, 6 neon tetras, 2 black skirt tetras, 1 pleco, 1 African frog, 5 ghost shrimp, 2 swordtails.

I have been doing 20-40% water changes everyday for the past 3 days and still no change in the nitrite levels. I've remove as much dying plant material as I can see and told my wife to reduce the amount she feeds the fish.

From what I've read there isn't really a quick fix for the nitrites, but there should be something...Bio-Spira? (Though I haven't had any luck looking for it, I may have to try some of the other lfs's in the area.)

Any suggestions?

 

[sweetsuvvyb]

You can add salt to the tank to prevent the nitrites from harming your fish (it won't do anything to the nitrite levels themselves, but it will prevent the nitrite from being absorbed into the fishes bloodstream). You'll want to keep up the water changes, as well.

I don't really have any advice on the white patch unfortunately...hopefully someone else will!

 

[vega]

Once u finish with the medicine process, the cheapest and safest way for you now would be putting a bag of active carbon in the tank. the carbon will not only absord the left over medicine, it will also abosrd the amonia and NO2/NO3 in ur tank.

but remember this is only short term solution until ur tank start to cycle as tank with plant might suffer a bit (carbon absord everything in the water inc the mineral needed by the plant).

But imho, slow growing plant can easily regrow but fish kill by water poisoning are lost permenant.

 

[Allivymar]

Ack. Sounds like your poor gourami has columnaris aka flex. Its a bacterial infection caused by the flexibactor bacteria and is often known as mouth fungus as it sorta looks like a fungal infection. Its also the number one infection in fishtanks.

Maracyn is a good treatment choice; you'll want to combine it with Maracyn 2 to be sure you're treating fully. You also may want to treat the entire tank as well tho to keep any of the others from getting ill. You can read up on it here: http://www.fishpalace.org/Disease.html#External . Scroll to Columnaris and do follow the link in the other notes as well. It will answer a lot of your questions (ie: high nitrites can precipitate an attack of columnaris)