Help with disease identification please

[Sidney73]

I have a 135 gallon display tank that I've had for 8 years with 2 clown loaches, 2 plecos, 1 roseline shark, frontosa, green terror, and vieja syn. I moved them here to NY from OH in August. (Moved them from Boston to Ohio 2 1/2 years ago - my fish are well traveled, lol.) I recently committed the cardinal sin of adding fish with no quarantine period (added a gold severum, EB jd, fire mouth, another clown loach, and some zebra danios.) After about 2 week, the new gold severum is now in quarantine with (I think?) ich and a bacterial infection (personality/color is great, eating fine), and now my old loaches look like they have ich (personality/color is great, eating fine - just rubbing on logs). Both tanks are getting daily water changes and ice-x treatments. I would love help making sure that is what it is so that I am treating it properly. Thanks!

ammonia 0, nitrites 0, nitrates 40, temp 80, pH 7.4
Fluval fx6
5~How many fish are in the tank? 16 What kinds of fish are they and what are their current sizes? See above Older ones are 4-6 inches, newer ones 2-3
6~When is the last time you did a water change and vacuum the gravel - a few days ago How often do you do this? water change every week, vacuum every 3. How much water do you remove at a time? 1/3-1/2
7~How long have you had the fish? If the fish is new, how did you acclimate it/them? floated bag, added water gradually over 40 minutes
8~Have you added anything new to the tank--decor, new dechlorinator, new substrate, etc.? no
9~What kind of food have you been feeding your fish, have you changed their diet recently? Mostly NLS, occasionally frozen shrimp/bloodworms, occasional cucumber or zucchini

 

[Sidney73]

Sorry, I don't think pics came through - try again...

 

[Andy Sager]

You have an interesting situation because the Severum looks like it has Epistylis while the Clown Loach looks like it has ick. Ick will appear like salt crystals all basically symmetrical in size, shape and color. Epistylis appears as different shaped spots that can be fuzzy in appearance. Ick is feeding on the fish's blood. Epistylis is feeding on the bacteria on the outside of the fish. You can treat ick with heat ( Heat actually just speeds up the life cycle of the parasite. It doesn't really kill the parasite directly) but heat increases the bacteria level on the fish and has no effect on Epistylis and the increased bacteria can hurt the fish over time. As you can see, you really need to use 2 separate hospital tanks to treat these fish.
(Just a side note here: Ich is more a sign of other problems more than a disease itself. A healthy fish can usually handle an Ick outbreak because it has a strong immune system. If you add fish that are sick to a healthy tank of fish and the old ones get infected, that's a sign your tank/fish is not as healthy as you think it is. )

You'll want to use an antiparasitic for the Clown Loach. You need to follow the directions of whatever you use regarding scaleless fish. You'll need to use an antibiotic for the Severum. The right antibiotic will depend on your water parameters. If your pH is 7.4 in the hospital tank, Kanamycin ( seachem Kanaplex) is going to be your best choice. Once the bacteria is gone, the Epistylis parasites die off from starvation so you are not actually treating the parasite, you are treating it's food source.

If you need help in setting up the hospital tanks properly, this thread explains what to do in post #2: Quarantine tanks and Hospital tanks, are they really different?

Hope this helps.

 

[Sidney73]

Thank you for your in depth response - much appreciated!!! I have some KanaPlex on hand actually. I was just about to do my water changes - I have 1 day left of ich-X treatment I was going to use on the Severum. Should I forget the last dose of ich-X and do the Kanaplex instead tonight? Or both?

I'm treating the entire 135 gallon tank with ich-X anti parasitic - 2 more days left of that treatment - I'll see how the loach is after that...

As far as the general health of the tank, I'm still learning and experimenting. When the fish made the trip here in October (I misspoke above when I said August) I think my nitrates were too high and I lost my favorite fish - a huge gold severum. A handful of the fish got a little bit of Ich that didn't last more than a few days, but he got popeye and died. I cried for days. I have the nitrates down to 40 now, and everything has seemed fine. I also started doing more frequent water changes (I have someone come and do a really thorough clean every 3 or 4 weeks) but I've been changing out 50% myself every Friday. As a side note, I don't think I'm a heavy feeder, a couple small pinches of food, or 2 frozen cubes a day, no more. Do you think maybe the 50/60% water change is too much? I noticed the pH has been going up. I have a ton of driftwood so the pH is usually at 7. I just wanted to keep the nitrates down... Why does fish keeping have to be so complicated????!! hahahaha

 

[Andy Sager]

This is why I said to use 2 hospital tanks. Ich-X is probably doing nothing for the Severum. You kill the Epistylis parasite directly with heavy salt treatment and clean water. There are conflicting results with Malachite Green or Methylene Blue. By using an antibiotic to kill the fish's food, it will also help prevent any secondary bacterial infections that may occur where the parasites were attached to the fish. On the other hand, the salt treatment is not the best or recommended for the Loach. Treating the whole tank with an antibiotic besides being expensive, exposes the healthy fish to medication it doesn't need and has the potential for creating resistant strains of pathogens. Most likely, if the Severum and loach were new, they probably came to you infected already. The proper treatment for the one is not the proper treatment for the other.
Also, regarding treating the whole tank, the Ich parasite only has stages when medication will kill it. ( Ich has an on the fish and off the fish stage.) So the medication would need to be present for an extended period of time to ensure the parasites are gone. When Ich is on the fish, it's not really susceptible to medication. It's when the parasite is in the free swimming stage and looking for a host that the medication kills them. ( This is probably what you saw before because ich is not cured or only present for a few days just because it is off the fish.) If you use a separate bare bottom tank, when the parasites leave the fish to reproduce, you can either vacuum the bottom or remove the fish and sterilize the tank and place the fish back into the hospital tank if it still has some spots. You can either continue doing this or use a medication for a full life cycle of the parasite so that you catch it during the free swimming stage.
Regarding your current nitrate reading of 40 ppm, that is at the upper limits of acceptable. At this level, it's recommended to do water changes to reduce them. The lower the better. If you don't have live plants, there is no need to have any nitrates in the water. Just sayin'
Regarding feeding: The recommended amount of food is whatever amount the fish can consume in a 2-3 minute timeframe 2-3 times per day. The bigger the variety of food, the better.
With the amount of fish you are keeping, doing more frequent smaller water changes per week would be better than doing one larger water change once a week.
As for 'Why does fish keeping have to be so complicated????!!" It's because what should be happening is a complimentary ecology in which the ammonia coming from the life forms is successfully reduced via natural sources and transformations and which the end product of that is naturally converted back into an inert end product that is removed via an exchange of gasses at the water's surface. The problem is that the majority of people keeping fish do not realize that fish keeping is all that and put too much life in the tank for the natural resources that are present. They try to under feed or cheat on maintenance to keep the water in better shape for the fish. The end result of that is more frequent diseases, more tank maintenance and shorter lived fish or life forms. ( And that's just the short answer. ) I've been keeping fish for 60 years. I've seen many theories come and go and none of them have changed the fact that if you overload the tank, it takes more work to keep everything healthy. It's not impossible to do, just more work on your part.

 

[Sidney73]

Definitely more work! Thanks so much for all this. Back to work (did the 135, now I have to attend to the 10 gallon.) Rinse repeat tomorrow. Lol