Show me your aquarium

[extraT]

Thank you to everyone, especially to HustleRussell for their relied yesterday.

I have no idea what happened, but this morning when I came down fearing the worst, it was like a brand new, completely different tank! The mollies are as active as they have ever been, the gourami is swimming around happily! It’s like a brand new tank full of vigour!

Edited by extraT on Tuesday 30th November 07:28

[HustleRussell]

extraT said:

Thank you to everyone, especially to HustleRussell for their relied yesterday.

I have no idea what happened, but this morning when I came down fearing the worst, it was like a brand new, completely different tank! The mollies are as active as they have ever been, the gourami is swimming around happily! It’s like a brand new tank full of vigour!

Edited by extraT on Tuesday 30th November 07:28

Looks great, glad they've recovered. Remain vigilant though, something must've stressed them. I'm not implying that you're doing anything wrong- sometimes unexpected or apparently unrelated things can cause an upset. I've read about people who have lost fish and eventually attributed it to their partner using an aerosol surface cleaner / polish etc. Also equipment can go intermittent but behave itself when you're watching and things like that.

HustleRussell yesterday said:

What do we think of this guy?

I bought 10 of these Celestial Pearl Danios two weeks ago and I noticed that this one had a hollow belly, a hogging back and a slightly downward tail. I wondered if he would improve but today I notice that he has clamped fins.

Temp 24
PH 7.5
Ammonia / Nitrite 0
Nitrate ~40

The other 9 are fine

There is a light patch on his right flank if you look closely, between dorsal and tail.

I have been feeding generously to ensure he gets food but he doesn’t have the verve of the others and expends a lot of his energy evading the others who appear to bully him a bit.

Genetic defect? Fungal infection? Worms?



P.S. they’re all in my quarantine tank with some Ramshorn snails for company

EDIT: Watched him closely at feeding time. I fed frozen cyclops. He was slow to start eating and then once he'd started, most of the time he was spitting the food back out again. He appeared to be getting some of it down.

I took my own advice and added some aquarium salt yesterday. It's the first time I've used it- seems very counter-intuitive to spoon a pretty large quantity (1g / litre) of salt directly into the aquarium. I was watching the haze spread through the water and half expecting all the occupants in the tank to go belly up. Going to increase it to 3g / litre over the following days as per instructions for supplementing fish treatment.

However, if it is an infectious disease I am going to need to treat it or risk the other 9 going the same way. I can go out and buy a treatment but I can't figure out whether this is bacterial, fungal or parasitic- and there's always a chance that its a defect or injury of some kind as he has always looked emaciated.

He looks emaciated and listless and recently his tail has gone from the usual fanned-out shape to being straight and clamped together.

He seems to be able to go wherever he wants so it hasn't affected his buoyancy or stability. However he appears listless and hangs out away from the others. The others tend to occupy the lower parts and right hand side of the tank. He hangs out in the top half and to the right- perhaps where the water flow is lowest.

There is no excessive redness on the gills. Respiration rate looks normal.

He is not flitting or flicking on surfaces

His spine is straight when viewed from above but gives a hogging impression when viewed from the side. Difficult to know whether that appearance is just because his abdomen is so hollow though.

He is attempting to ear but regurgitating a lot of it

The only outward clue as to the illness (and I'm not certain about it because it's tough to get a close look at such a small and skittish species) is that he has this lighter patch on his right flank behind the dorsal fin and perhaps his skin or mucus layer maybe looks a little more opaque / milky in general?

It does not look like the cotton wool- like fungus. If I had to guess- Velvet?

[HustleRussell]

Flubendazole in. Not sure its going to be able to save the poorly fish but fingers crossed.

[otolith]

That fish looks seriously unwell. Good call on the quarantine, though I will be surprised if it pulls through.

[HustleRussell]

It's a pity because I knew something was up two weeks ago when I brought them home- however there were no external clues as to what I should be treating and I thought it'd either be a developmental defect which wouldn't get better and/or malnourishment which would.

He seemed stable but I was away at the weekend and he had declined noticeably when I got back (tail clamped).

I still don't have a lot to go on but the don't know if the Flubendazole is the right treatment but I received good advice from the guy in the local Maidenhead Aquatics who said that they bung Flubentazole in as a preventative in quarantine as a matter of course. The symptoms are consistent with worms and flukes and I've read that F. is effective against other parasites like Velvet so a pretty broad band.

Believe it or not I paid £5.60 each for these little Danios (not from my local nor the oft-recommended Fish Barn in Crawley) and the guy netting them seemed to know his stuff so I left him to it and didn't eyeball them too hard.

[otolith]

One worrying thing that occurred to me was the remote possibility of fish TB - wasting, skeletal deformation. So I was googling to see if there were any pictures of tb infected danios, and I came across this thread;

https://www.ukaps.org/forum/threads/celestial-dani...

(they only mentioned TB as a possibility, but there is some discussion about this condition being common in danios)

Edited by otolith on Tuesday 30th November 16:34

[HustleRussell]

I don't see any cause to suspect TB specifically.

I still haven't figured out what I'm treating (if anything). His condition appears to have improved but I suspect it's because I am delivering food to him with a turkey baster. His mobility and his ability to get the food down hasn't really improved.

[HustleRussell]

Found him rooted to the bottom of the tank just now so I decided to euthanise.

Having read about 'Neon Tetra Disease', which is common in Danios, and the organism which causes it, I couldn't risk the remaining fish predating upon him.

Still don't know what it was. As I said earlier, his outward appearance seemed to have improved with care but apparently he was too badly damaged internally.

ETA: To head off an inevitable question, the best I could do by way of euthanasia was to net him, then quickly put him in a sandwich bag and smash him with a heavy, flat-bottomed object.

Edited by HustleRussell on Thursday 2nd December 18:33

[otolith]

No, I thought TB was unlikely, that’s just how I stumbled on that thread where others have had similar problems.

[extraT]

Not related to my earlier posts, thank goodness. I have been given a UV light, without any housing. You can submerge it in water. I also happen to have a plastic filter box which actually came with my aquarium. It would be perfect to hide the heater and UV light in, but it’s been in a cupboard and is now a bit dusty and not in the best condition. With a bit of cleaning it would be fine. What would be the best way to clean this box? Think dusty, perhaps a cobweb in there.

Could I just boil it in hot water

[Sway]

extraT said:

Not related to my earlier posts, thank goodness. I have been given a UV light, without any housing. You can submerge it in water. I also happen to have a plastic filter box which actually came with my aquarium. It would be perfect to hide the heater and UV light in, but it’s been in a cupboard and is now a bit dusty and not in the best condition. With a bit of cleaning it would be fine. What would be the best way to clean this box? Think dusty, perhaps a cobweb in there.

Could I just boil it in hot water

Wouldn't even go that far. Quick rinse in old tank water after a water change. Done.

Just be aware some plastics get brittle over time with UV exposure.

[Caddyshack]

The U.V sounds odd, I wonder if it is part of a green water / pond setup? What do you want it to do? Normally they have a quart sleeve and the water should pass slowly over it. The U.V output drops over time.

[otolith]

An unshielded UV tube will kill everything, and one in a box won’t do anything, must be more to it than that?

[extraT]

Sorry should have added, the UV did have a shield but the shield broke. Mate bought a new one but said I could have iy. The actual uv light itself is fine.

What I have is an old bio box filter shield- you can store the heater/uv and it had an internal filter pump (incredibly weak) in there. I brought an external filter so never used the bio box.
As I have now an external pump, I can put the box in the aquarium with uv and heater, and the external filter arm will pull the warm sterilised water up and expel. Basically I’d be encompassing the filter intake arm and uv light in a box that is specifically designed for a filter. But the box is a bit dusty etc… so want to clean it first.

[otolith]

Gotcha. I’d probably just rinse it thoroughly under the hot tap, if I were paranoid I’d soak it in thin bleach first.

[AndrewGP]

Our 60 litre cube tank continues to do well, it’s been established over 3 years now with just periodic light rescapes and normal weekly maintenance. Took me a while to balance the CO2, light levels and plant food levels, but it’s super stable now and easy to look after with almost no algae. Fish are guppies, cardinal tetras and rummy nose tetras.

[Sway]

Oh that's lovely...

Also really nice to hear of a 'proper' aquascaped tank run longer term. So many are short lived temporary affairs.

[AndrewGP]

Thank you

Although it’s going great, the reason for its longevity is partly due to the difficulty of aquascaping a cube. Being taller than it’s long, it can be quite limiting and I do find that a little frustrating at times. I think if it was a conventional shape, I’d be ripping it apart every few months!

[otolith]

Very nice! I used to have a planted cube of similar size;

[otolith]

I have a little experiment going, which is either going to result in a useful nitrate sink, or my mbuna have a £50 salad. Anubias and java fern, lots of it. I put half in last Sunday and after they didn’t get trashed, the rest today. So far, so good. And it looks nice.