Somethings Fishy
Aquarium Advice Apprentice
Very sick fish
My 6x2x2ft has 2x oscar, 1 x green terror, 1 x nicaragua, 1 x featherfin & 1 x bristlenose. The tank has been established for about 3 years with no changes in the stock at all.
My water parameters are GH 9, KH 6, PH 7.8, ammonia 0, nitrite 0, nitrate just registers. I test my water just before a water change & again 4 days later. The parameters are stable. I know the PH is a bit too high but the fish were all born & raised in the exact same water conditions. I do 150lt water change every saturday. I age my water before use in a bare tank with a filter seeded from the main tank. I set all my GH, KH, PH & heat before adding to the main aquarium.
Over the last 2 months the fish in this tank have developed a series of symptoms that has me very worried & completely baffled.
It started with scratching/flashing that has gotten worse with time. Now bad enough to remove scales. Next the terror & nicaragua started head shaking & shimmying. That has also gotten worse but only those two fish do it. Two weeks ago things started to get rather disturbing when the fish stoped swimming around in favour of holding position near filter outlets & airstones in a 45 degree headstanding position. They appear to be gasping for air but are not going to the surface unless it's to eat. The terror sits on the bottom but none of the others do. The fish have turned shy & all hide when I come near the tank. I could hand feed the terror & oscars 2months ago. Now 4 days ago everything except one oscar went off it's food & haven't shown any interest in eating since. Faeces are white & stringy, thick & thin.
I feed HBH Flake Frenzy, Oscar Grow & 8 Veggie Flake with a weekly feed of guppys I breed myself & a weekly feed of frozen brineshrimp or bloodworms. Twice a day what the fish can eat in under 3mins with the excess removed immediatley if there is any. Friday is a fasting day.
The symptoms started while I was treating a whitespot outbreak with trisulphates. After 2 weeks of the whitespot treatment I gave them a break for two weeks then ran a course of sterazin as I believed it to be a gill parasite but the treatment hasn't done anything.
Now that the fish have had a rest after the sterazin I'm looking for the next thing that this may be. I've been through as much literature as I can find & can't come up with anything that fits with all these symptoms so I'm thinking multiple problems. Maybe intesenal parasite, I'm specifically thinking Hexamitiasis.
Any suggestions of causes & cures would be much appreciated.
My 6x2x2ft has 2x oscar, 1 x green terror, 1 x nicaragua, 1 x featherfin & 1 x bristlenose. The tank has been established for about 3 years with no changes in the stock at all.
My water parameters are GH 9, KH 6, PH 7.8, ammonia 0, nitrite 0, nitrate just registers. I test my water just before a water change & again 4 days later. The parameters are stable. I know the PH is a bit too high but the fish were all born & raised in the exact same water conditions. I do 150lt water change every saturday. I age my water before use in a bare tank with a filter seeded from the main tank. I set all my GH, KH, PH & heat before adding to the main aquarium.
Over the last 2 months the fish in this tank have developed a series of symptoms that has me very worried & completely baffled.
It started with scratching/flashing that has gotten worse with time. Now bad enough to remove scales. Next the terror & nicaragua started head shaking & shimmying. That has also gotten worse but only those two fish do it. Two weeks ago things started to get rather disturbing when the fish stoped swimming around in favour of holding position near filter outlets & airstones in a 45 degree headstanding position. They appear to be gasping for air but are not going to the surface unless it's to eat. The terror sits on the bottom but none of the others do. The fish have turned shy & all hide when I come near the tank. I could hand feed the terror & oscars 2months ago. Now 4 days ago everything except one oscar went off it's food & haven't shown any interest in eating since. Faeces are white & stringy, thick & thin.
I feed HBH Flake Frenzy, Oscar Grow & 8 Veggie Flake with a weekly feed of guppys I breed myself & a weekly feed of frozen brineshrimp or bloodworms. Twice a day what the fish can eat in under 3mins with the excess removed immediatley if there is any. Friday is a fasting day.
The symptoms started while I was treating a whitespot outbreak with trisulphates. After 2 weeks of the whitespot treatment I gave them a break for two weeks then ran a course of sterazin as I believed it to be a gill parasite but the treatment hasn't done anything.
Now that the fish have had a rest after the sterazin I'm looking for the next thing that this may be. I've been through as much literature as I can find & can't come up with anything that fits with all these symptoms so I'm thinking multiple problems. Maybe intesenal parasite, I'm specifically thinking Hexamitiasis.
Any suggestions of causes & cures would be much appreciated.