Arrrggghh - White Spot Wont Go

[BlueCat]

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Hi all
Im a little new to the fish keeping (about 4 months) but have the bug and have grown quite attached to my little buddies lol.

So with that said i need your help please http/www.fishforums.net/style_emoticons/default/shifty.gif

I have a 60 litre tank
1 Comet
1 Fantail
1 Black Moor
All med-large
Internal ELITE Stingray filter
Water change every 2 weeks approx (siphon) by 10-20%
Declorinate all new water

Symptoms are white spots on my black moor and fantail for just over a week now -
also my Black moor looks like he has a fine sprinkling of dust over parts of him
i have already lost 1 small speckled fish yesterday
My Comet is darting around irratically and they do dash to the bottom of the tank and brush their sides on the gravel
Ive been treating them with King British WS3 for white spot

Ive tested for Ammonia - Nitrite - Nitrate + PH and all fine apparently

But today my Black moor is looking real poorly - not doing much at all
im just a little worried that the treatment is'nt working - the spots dont seem to be dissapearing -
or that i have got the diognosis wrong.

Can anyone help please??

BlueCat

 

[WILDER]

The tank is way overstocked, the first goldfish alone need 20 gallons, then 10 gallons for another goldfish added, so you should be keeping them in 50 gallon tank.
Whitespot looks like they have been sprinkled in salt.
A dusting can be velvet.
Turn temp up to 30, increase aeration in the tank as the med and high temp reduce 02 in the water.
Remove black carbon if you use it.
Can you post water stats in ammonia, nitrite,nitrate, and ph, as darting about the tank can be due to bad water quality aswell as parasites.

 

[black angel]

med - large fish to me is around 5 inches body length for fantail shaped fish....so...if that the case then yes they are relly stressed which may be why they have whitespot.

A common and effective way to get rid of whitespot is naturally using aquarium salt, but you can use pickling or anything with out any additives.
Its not the whitespot that kills them per say but the secondary infections that come aboard because the fish are weakened, such as kidney damage.
Whitespot quickens its lifecycle at higher temperatures and using salt will dislodge them off the skin and then onto the gravel floor where they can be syphoned up.
If the fish are strong enough then they can handle it well, but the blackmoor doesnt sound too good and may already be fighting something else.

If you can put the sick one in a seperate tank/container with lots of air then you can treat him seperately.

For the others you can add 1 teaspoon of aquarium salt per gallon pre mixed and dissolved in some hot water to gove you a .1% solution. 12 hours later add another teaspoon per gallon and again 12 hours later. You will need to get to .3% for the salt to be effective.
Leave at this solution for a couple of weeks and it will also help your fish to breathe better through the gills.

Do a small water change each day of around 25% to clean the gravel of any that may be there.

For the sick one, doing a salt bath at a level of 1 and a half teaspoons per gallon for 30 minutes will help that one.

Some people dont like to use salt so if you wish to stick to chemicals then make sure the overhead light is off as well as no carbon. You can do the .3% as a salt bath for the infected fish for around 5 minutes each but remove the fish if it starts to roll or not move. Breathing slowing down is normal.

In the long term, get a bigger tank and use the small one as a quarantine as then you can stop anything like whitespot from entering your system through new fish.
The above works for velvet as well, only velvet is a lot harder to cure than whitespot.

 

[Tokis-Phoenix]

If you live in the UK, i have found that "anti whitespot" by Interpet to be a very effective med at getting rid of whitespot, treatment takes around 2weeks .

Doing more regular water changes and substrate cleaning sessions will also help a great deal in helping reduce the background levels of whitespot, since during certain stages in this parasites life cycle it is free-swimming and not visable to the naked eye and lives on surfaces like in the substrate in the tank.

In general though, it would be a lot more beneficial to do larger and more regular water changes with dechlorinator on the tank, goldfish are large waste producing fish and doing something like a once weekly 30-60% water change will help keep the water quality a lot fresher and more stable and help prevent the fish from fallin ill in the future .

With fancy goldfish, generally speaking, it is advised that you have 20gallons for the first goldfish and 10 for every one after that. Some fancy varieties grow smaller or larger than others though, so this is only a guide, but fantails and moores are the largest growing fancy varieties of goldfish- although they often max out at 10inches long, certain specimens have been known to grow larger than that.
Fancy goldfish generally grow smaller and are less active than the non-fancy varieties of goldfish like comets and comets, of which these varieties can easily exceed 15inches+ long given enough space, non-fancy goldfish are generally also a lot more cold loving fish than the fancy varieties of goldfish (which tend to be more sub-tropical than coldwater), which is why a lot of people choose to keep such goldfish in ponds, since you need a very large tank to house a 15inch long goldfish (we're talking a 5x2x2ft tank or larger) permanently in.

I understand if some of this info may come as a suprise to you, since many people still associate bowls with goldfish, but if you want to give your goldfish the best quality of life, they do need large tanks which are strongly filtered and kept clean on a regular basis since in general goldfish are large growing fish which enough high oxygen levels in their tanks/ponds and clean water.
In a bowl, a goldfish is lucky to live a few months and will probably not grow larger than a couple of inches long, in a small tank (i.e. less than 20gallons), the goldfish may live to over a decade old (although it may live a lot less than that depending on how well the tank is maintained) and grow to a medium size, in a good proper sized tank which is adequate or good for the particular variety of goldfishes needs and number of goldfish etc and its properly maintained etc, the goldfish could easily live to over 20-30years old or more and grow to a large size .

 

[BlueCat]

Hi all

Thank you for your replies.

Sadly this morning i lost my Blacky.

I think i was wrong when i said med-large,
because from a fish shop i was told i could keep 4 nice size fish and maybe 4-5 minos depending on size.

If this is incorrect information id be greatful if you'd say.

My Fantail is 2inches long from nose to tail end and my comet is 3inches so by looking at your posts these are small lol

My stats are : Ammonia 0ppm
Nitrate 0ppm
Nitrite 0ppm
PH 7.4

 

[Tokis-Phoenix]

Hi all

Thank you for your replies.

Sadly this morning i lost my Blacky.

I think i was wrong when i said med-large,
because from a fish shop i was told i could keep 4 nice size fish and maybe 4-5 minos depending on size.

If this is incorrect information id be greatful if you'd say.

My Fantail is 2inches long from nose to tail end and my comet is 3inches so by looking at your posts these are small lol

My stats are : Ammonia 0ppm
Nitrate 0ppm
Nitrite 0ppm
PH 7.4

I am sorry to hear that one of the goldfish passed away, but it is still definately worth while treating the tank for whitespot .


With petshop advice, it is petshop to take it with a pinch of salt sometimes, since when it comes to fish many petshop staff are not very knowledgeable on fish (because many staff are very under-trained knowledge-wise when it comes to fishkeeping) and even if their intentions are good, they may still give out incorrect or semi-incorrect info. There is simply so much to learn on fishkeeping, you cannot really expect minimum wage payed petshop staff to be of much help, the best thing to do is to always rely most of all on your own thorough research which has been gone about via up-to-date fishkeeping books and good internet sites etc etc .

With the actual petshop advice you are given, it is really very vague more than anything else. There are many types of fish which can be kept in a tank such as yours, but there are even more fish which are unsuitable for the tank even if size-wise they fit. The best thing to do is to simply create of list of fish which interest you and then do your research on each type of fish individually and narrow the list down as you go along as you find out which fish are suitable or not for the tank and which fish you would still like to keep based on their care/maintanence, habitat preferences, tankmate preferences, personality and activity levels etc .


It is good that you have 0 ammonia and nitrites, however it is worrying that you don't have any nitrates in the tank since nitrates are the end product of the nitrogen cycle and if there aren't any nitrates it either means that the tank is not completely cycled/established or there is something else going on (for example, heavily planted tanks full of thriving plants sometimes don't have any nitrates since plants absorb nitrates as a form of fertiliser for them etc).
If the tank hasn't been set up for long enough to be established properly then that would be the most obvious reason why there aren't any nitrates, however you can do things even when the tank has established itself to cause it to un-established itself and go through a mini-cycle. For more info on understanding how the water quality in aquariums works, i have found this article to be very good for such things in the link below;

[URL="http/www.fishforums.net/index.php?showtopic=10099"]http/www.fishforums.net/index.php?showtopic=10099[/URL]





How long has the tank been set up for and how did you go about it exactly? How do you clean the filtration in your tank exactly when it needs doing and how often do you do it ?