Jim Sinclair
Fish Fanatic
I'll post symptoms below, but most urgently: Where can I (person living on nothing but SSI benefits, which for anyone who doesn't know, is barely enough to stay alive and out of homelessness) get enough antibiotic to treat over 500 gallons of tanks? What I have been using in a small (4 gallon) hospital tank is API E.M. Erythromycin. The two fish in the hospital tank, one since Tuesday night and the other since last night, have surprisingly stayed alive and might even be doing slightly better, but I think I need to treat all my tanks.
I have a 400+ gallon pond with adult goldfish and five tanks with young ones. So far this week, while doing daily water changes (because I *know* the tanks with the young fish are overstocked, you don't have to tell me that, just tell me how to find good safe homes for commons and comets where they won't be used as feeders and I'll gratefully let them go; until then daily 20% water change is the best I can do) I've found three of the young fish dead from two different tanks, two (from the same tank that had two dead ones) so ill that I initially thought they were dead, and two (in a different tank that hasn't had any fatalities yet) that don't appear that desperately ill (yet) but appear to have milder versions of the same symptoms: bright red gills and poor swimming. So far the adults in the pond seem all right.
The three that I found dead, and the two that I thought were dead until I scooped them out and saw that they were still moving, were floating sideways and in a kind of bent posture. When moved to the hospital tank, the live ones have been kind of hanging head-downward in the water. After 24 hours in there with the erythromycin (plus salt, at about one tablespoon/5 gallons), the first one managed to get itself down to the bottom, still head downward. That appeared to be something it did on purpose and with some effort, to get to the bottom instead of hanging near the top.
Per package instructions, I used about one packet per 10 gallons (so about half a packet for my 4 gallon hospital tank, because it's easier to estimate half a packet than 40% of a packet) when I set up the hospital tank for the first fish Tuesday night (completely clean water; I found the fish when doing a water change so I had clean conditioned water that had already been sitting in the same room coming to match temperature with the tank), repeated the same dose last night (when I also discovered and added the second affected fish), and tonight I should do a 25% water change then dose again, followed by a fourth dose tomorrow night. That will, according to the package, be a full treatment for the first fish I put in there.
The second fish will have had only three doses, so if it's still alive I guess I should give it a fourth dose Saturday night.
Problem is, tonight's dose will use up the package I have on hand. So I need to buy more, before tomorrow night, just to finish treating the two fish already in the hospital tank.
And given the fact of two dead fish and these two deathly ill ones all from the same tank (which is 75 gallons), I should probably treat the entire tank they came from.
And given a third dead fish from a second tank, and a couple of fish with red gills and lethargy and poor eating in a third tank, I should probably treat all my tanks with little ones, and be prepared to treat the big pond too if the big fish start to be affected.
Where can I get antibiotic in large enough quantity to handle this?
And what's the thing with red gills? I keep reading that fish gills are supposed to be red. Then on the erythromycin package listing the diseases it treats, it lists bacterial red gill disease, with red gills as a symptom. Then when I look online about goldfish diseases several of them also list red gills as a symptom.
Obviously floating sideways or head down is a very bad symptom, and those fish are very definitely sick. Are their red gills also a symptom? What's the difference between healthy red gills and sick red gills? The skin around the gills doesn't look abnormal.
I have a 400+ gallon pond with adult goldfish and five tanks with young ones. So far this week, while doing daily water changes (because I *know* the tanks with the young fish are overstocked, you don't have to tell me that, just tell me how to find good safe homes for commons and comets where they won't be used as feeders and I'll gratefully let them go; until then daily 20% water change is the best I can do) I've found three of the young fish dead from two different tanks, two (from the same tank that had two dead ones) so ill that I initially thought they were dead, and two (in a different tank that hasn't had any fatalities yet) that don't appear that desperately ill (yet) but appear to have milder versions of the same symptoms: bright red gills and poor swimming. So far the adults in the pond seem all right.
The three that I found dead, and the two that I thought were dead until I scooped them out and saw that they were still moving, were floating sideways and in a kind of bent posture. When moved to the hospital tank, the live ones have been kind of hanging head-downward in the water. After 24 hours in there with the erythromycin (plus salt, at about one tablespoon/5 gallons), the first one managed to get itself down to the bottom, still head downward. That appeared to be something it did on purpose and with some effort, to get to the bottom instead of hanging near the top.
Per package instructions, I used about one packet per 10 gallons (so about half a packet for my 4 gallon hospital tank, because it's easier to estimate half a packet than 40% of a packet) when I set up the hospital tank for the first fish Tuesday night (completely clean water; I found the fish when doing a water change so I had clean conditioned water that had already been sitting in the same room coming to match temperature with the tank), repeated the same dose last night (when I also discovered and added the second affected fish), and tonight I should do a 25% water change then dose again, followed by a fourth dose tomorrow night. That will, according to the package, be a full treatment for the first fish I put in there.
The second fish will have had only three doses, so if it's still alive I guess I should give it a fourth dose Saturday night.
Problem is, tonight's dose will use up the package I have on hand. So I need to buy more, before tomorrow night, just to finish treating the two fish already in the hospital tank.
And given the fact of two dead fish and these two deathly ill ones all from the same tank (which is 75 gallons), I should probably treat the entire tank they came from.
And given a third dead fish from a second tank, and a couple of fish with red gills and lethargy and poor eating in a third tank, I should probably treat all my tanks with little ones, and be prepared to treat the big pond too if the big fish start to be affected.
Where can I get antibiotic in large enough quantity to handle this?
And what's the thing with red gills? I keep reading that fish gills are supposed to be red. Then on the erythromycin package listing the diseases it treats, it lists bacterial red gill disease, with red gills as a symptom. Then when I look online about goldfish diseases several of them also list red gills as a symptom.
Obviously floating sideways or head down is a very bad symptom, and those fish are very definitely sick. Are their red gills also a symptom? What's the difference between healthy red gills and sick red gills? The skin around the gills doesn't look abnormal.
