What do you normally feed the fish?
When was it last fed?
Is it still eating?
What does its poop look like?
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It's probably from a parasitic worm that got lost and is chewing or has chewed its way out of the fish.
The fish is breathing heavily and that is caused by pain.
The jerky swimming is from the pain too.
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You can try deworming the fish and hoping it survives, or euthanising it. The rest of the fish should be dewormed to make sure they don't have anything in them. Flubendazole is good if you can get it, or look for Levamisole.
Section 3 of the following link has information on deworming fish.
Fish do a stringy white poop for several reasons. 1) Internal Bacterial Infections causes the fish to stop eating, swell up like a balloon, breath heavily at the surface or near a filter outlet, do stringy white poop, and die within 24-48 hours of showing these symptoms. This cannot normally be...
www.fishforums.net
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To work out the volume of water in the tank:
measure length x width x height in cm.
divide by 1000.
= volume in litres.
When you measure the height, measure from the top of the substrate to the top of the water level.
If you have big rocks or driftwood in the tank, remove these before measuring the height of the water level so you get a more accurate water volume.
You can use a permanent marker to draw a line on the tank at the water level and put down how many litres are in the tank at that level.
There is a calculator/ converter in the "FishForum.net Calculator" under "Useful Links" at the bottom of this page that will let you convert litres to gallons if you need it.
Remove carbon from the filter before treating with chemicals or it will adsorb the medication and stop it working. You do not need to remove the carbon if you use salt.
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Before you treat the fish, do the following.
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 or until the problem is identified. 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.
