Allready Lost One, Three Still Sick, Help!

[Snowdrifta421]

Something has recently infected 4 of my bettas, and I've lost one allready. At first I thought it was ich, but it has not been responding to such treatment, and it now looks like something different. They are larger than ich parasites, and instead of covering the whole body like ich will, they are small in nomber, maybe two or three per fish and they are on the head, under the scales, kinda look like white breadcrumbs allmost, and one fish is VERY pale, I'm going to see if I can get my camera to work so that I can post a pic of it, any suggestions would be MUCH appreciated.

Thanks

 

[Loko17]

Sounds like white spot but get pics definately

 

[starrynightxxi]

it DOES sound like white spot/ich, but i've never heard of it UNDER the scales. Hmm... what other diseases cause cysts? You might want to try posting this on the emergency forum as well if you haven't.

 

[Wisperian]

fungus? or maybe its flesh?

 

[WILDER]

Is it a disc shape with legs, also under the scales you can get anchor worm, which looks like nylon with a forked tail.
Can you try and describe it more.

Look under fish louse.
http/www.2cah.com/pandora/Disease.html#Argulus

 

[WILDER]

We can only help you if you answer the questions, we can't see the fish, a pic would be good.

 

[Snowdrifta421]

I can't get either of my cameras to work, but it looks like fish lice, I checked out one of those links and it had some pictures of them on it. There were actually a bunch of them crawling around on the top and outside of the tank. The only thing that I could find that wasn't for use in ponds was Life Bearer. I put a some on the ones that were outside the tank and it killed em in seconds. I have been treating the fish with it for two days now, and they still look awful, but I only found like five of them crawling outside the tanks this morning, and there were a bunch of dead ones floating on the surface, so it must be working. It says to treat once every 24 hours until they are gone and then once every week for four weeks to prevent reinfestation. I sure hope it works.

 

[WILDER]

Ok, glad you are getting it under control, watch out for bacterial infections, as parasites are nasty and do alot of damage to a fish, good luck.

 

[Snowdrifta421]

GOOD NEWS!!!! This has been a tricky thing to deal with, its been hard to find any kind of good information as to how to deal with fish lice on Bettas. Apparently they usually show up on pond fish and since Koi and thier ponds are so much larger its been hard to adapt anything to work with my poor little bettas. But I think we have turned the final corner and headed down the home stretch this morning. When I got up today, they looked just awful!!! My little red guy's gills were so swollen that the surface of his face was actually higher than his eyes were!! I decided to use more drastic measures, because I was sure he wouldn't survive another 24 hours like this. Everything that I've read says that you should remove the larger ones with tweezers. I was afraid to do that though because they were all so close to thier eyes. So I netted each fish and with the net still in the water, put in three drops of the life bearer medicine, then I carefully scraped at the parasited with a Q-tip to get them to come off. It was easier than I thought it would be. After the first few attempts to remove one from each fish they actually held very still for me instead of wriggling around and trying to get away like I thought they would. While I was doing this, I was cycling water in three new clean 1 gallon hospital tanks for them. The little creepy crawlies must have just hatched again, because if I used a light and a magnifying glass, I could see tiny tiny tiny little ones moving along the inside of the glass. I let the rest for a few minutes and then I put several drops of the medicine on the net and squished it all around so it was covered with it. That way anything that tried to hitch a ride to the hospital wouldn't make there alive. Then I netted each fish up and put them in the "halfway house",just a little bowl with some clean water so that I could take another q-tip with a couple of drops of medicine on it and remove any few stubborn ones that wouldn't come off the first time, then I put them in thier new tank. So far they look SO much better, not terribly active (of course) but they are all sitting on the bottom of thier tanks with thier fins open and when I go up to check on them they kinda perk up and wiggle at me and sometimes they yawn and swim up to the top for a breath of air. I'm still a little worried about my red guy, his breathing is pretty labored but I think he will be ok. I treated them all with ampicillin, melafix and pimafix.

Thanks everyone for your help

 

[BWBettas]

My tip, from now on, get a new net and use it for the hospial tank only... or just buy a net for each tank!

Bret

 

[Snowdrifta421]

LOL funny you should say that! I just ordered a lot of fifteen brand new nets off Ebay, I mean like maybe five minutes ago, so I guess we're on the page anyway. I treated the net before handling the fish as mentioned before so that any of those little micro crabs that I accidentally netted up with my fish would be dead by the time they made to the ICU. I also figured help kill off those ones that were still stuck to them. Anyway, if anyone who believes in praying for sick bettas wouldn't mind. Could you take a second to ask Dude to stop in and throw a little healing dust down on my little red BF? We'd appreciate it.

Thanks again eveyone for your ideas and thoughts, it has helped a lot.