Tropical Angel Fish Help

Hello Everyone.
If their are Angel fish keepers out their, I really need your help and advice I am really concerned about my black Angel Fish marble has got something wrong around by the area between his eye and mouth and the last couple of days it has got worse and bigger in size. I have attached a photo can anyone advise me and what I can do Thankyou.

The experts in disease issues will be along to help you, but they will want to know some data to do so.
What are your water parameters (these refer to GH, KH, pH and temperature only), and water conditions (ammonia, nitrite, nitrate if you can test for these)?
What tank size and how long running, and what fish (species and numbers)?
What is your water change schedule and volume?
How long have you had this particular fish?

It appears to have an infection in the sinuses and mouth. There also appears to be lots of detritus worms in the water and on the glass. This is an indication of poor water quality and dirty gravel.

Test the water for ammonia, nitrite, nitrate and pH.

Wipe the inside of the glass down with a clean fish sponge. This removes the biofilm on the glass and the biofilm will contain lots of harmful bacteria, fungus, protozoans and various other microscopic life forms.

Do a 75% water change and gravel clean the substrate every day for a week. The water changes and gravel cleaning will reduce the number of disease organisms in the water and provide a cleaner environment for the fish to recover in. It also removes a lot of the gunk and this means any medication can work on treating the fish instead of being wasted killing the pathogens in the gunk.
Make sure any new water is free of chlorine/ chloramine before it is added to the tank.

Clean the filter if it hasn't been done in the last 2 weeks. However, if the filter is less than 6 weeks old, do not clean it. Wash the filter materials/ media in a bucket of tank water and re-use the media. Tip the bucket of dirty water on the garden/ lawn. Cleaning the filter means less gunk and cleaner water with fewer pathogens so any medication (if needed) will work more effectively on the fish.

Increase surface turbulence/ aeration to maximise the dissolved oxygen in the water.

See how it looks in a week. If it gets worse during that time, post more pictures.

If you start looking on the net for information on biofiltration and how it works, you will find a ton of information. Most of it will be written by people who really do not know the science and say things that are not accurate. It took me years bfore I finally started to understand it. The first step was to stop accepting what I read on sites and looking for the science I hoped existed. I found it and I found PhDs I could talk to as well.

It caused me to redo much of my filtration and a lot of my media. To understand how filtration should work in a tank we first need to understand how it works in nature. Nature has been keeping bodies of water filled with living things safe since well before humans even existed. So, a good place to start is to to learn how it works in nature and then what that means for us in the hobby where a lot of it happens in our tanks. The big difference is that everything that happens in a tank we cause by what we do or what we fail to do. There is nobody in nature who changes water or cleans the river/lake/pond etc.

About the best article I have found to explain everything in terms we all can easily understand is found on a site where I shop. It is owned by a PhD scientist. I have met him at fish events, exchanged emails with him and bought his foam for my filtration. I do not want folks to go there to shop unless they decide this is a good idea. That is not my reason for linking. This article is about as informative on the basics of filtration as I have read in 23 years in the hobby. So I am biased here for sure. But there is a difference between my liking what Dr. Tanner sells and my respecting what he has written. I feel the same way about Dr. Hovanec who also has a commercial site.

It really is not hard to separate the information andthe commercial with folks such as the above because they have published papers in scientific journals. Such papers are not written for commercial reasons. What these gents have done is to use their eduction and research to enable them to sell products they know work, scientifically speaking.

Happy reading: Aquarium Biofiltration