Fat Platy Might Have Swim Bladder Disease... Help!

[Essjay]

With a pH of 7, a reading of 0.25 will be virtually all ammonium. There will be 0.0014 ppm in the ammonia form.
I should have said that any reading higher than what is usual for the tank needs a water change. When a tank ammonia is normally 0.25, the time to do a water change is if it's more than 0.25. But if the tank ammonia is usually zero, having a reading of 0.25 indicates a possible problem brewing.

 

[AdoraBelle Dearheart]

OP, try dropping the water level down lower in her tank while you're treating and as she (hopefully) recovers. Deeper water means more pressure on the fishes swim bladder, and harder for them to go low to rest and get back to the top to feed. Dropping the water level can help.

Also try to make her quarantine tank as stress free as possible. Dim lighting or none at all, lots of plants and decor to help her feel safe and secure, so she's less likely to dart around and feel stressed out, or potentially injure herself since she has less control over her movements. I hope the rest, fasting, shelled pea and improved water conditions leads to a recovery.

 

[Retired Viking]

@PheonixKingZ That’s not true. It won’t help with Dropsy but it certainly can help with swim bladder disease! Fast the fish for a couple of days and then feed a blanched peeled pea. The fish may continue to be prone to SBD but you treat as it occurs. Cut back in feedings too.

I agree with @Deanasue I just had a similar issue with some new neons I had just added to my tank several started showing the same signs. I stopped feeding them and the next day or two they were fine. I now mix the dry flakes in tank water before feeding my tetra and have not seen any furthur issues.

 

[PheonixKingZ]

Look, all I did was search “Swim Bladder” in the search bar, and out in @Colin_T’s name. The results were all conclusive:

“Swim bladder, and there is no cure” “there is no treatment for swim bladder problems”

 

[Chad]

There are treatments for swim bladder disease. The problem we often run into is this - we call it swim bladder disease, but it isn't a disease. It is a symptom of several different possible diseases. I recommend a few things to try.

• Withhold food for two days. If the problem improves this indicates (but doesn't prove) that the problem is likely caused by air gulping. To keep it from happening in the future feed below the surface.
• Reduce the water level in the tank (or move to a shallow water tank) to about 5 inches. Increase the water temperature slowly over the course of a few days by a few degrees. I have found this works best with cold water fish but seldom with warm water fish.
• Treat with an antibacterial or (if the fish is salt tolerant) add aquarium salt (not table salt). 1gm per liter
• Take the fish to a vet who can do xrays and better see the cause/damage to the organ
• If the fish is in great distress and/or is unwilling to eat anymore then it might be kinder to put the fish down using humane and painless techniques.
• If a fish is still eating then there is more hope than less.

Those are my suggestions based on my experience. I've had success with these methods, but have also lost fish. In the end this is your fish and you will have to decide what is best. We can't really see what you see so take all the information and options you have been presented with and weigh them out to make an informed choice. It's never easy to have to euthanize a fish but it's also never easy to watch one suffer needlessly.

 

[AdoraBelle Dearheart]

Look, all I did was search “Swim Bladder” in the search bar, and out in @Colin_T’s name. The results were all conclusive:
View attachment 113521
“Swim bladder, and there is no cure” “there is no treatment for swim bladder problems”

That's the problem with just doing a search and not truly understanding what he's saying, or when and why he suggests certain treatments. If it was as easy as doing a search and picking out the highlights, we'd all be experts at diseases.

Have you also read him saying that real swim bladder disease is extremely rare? There are a whole bundle of conditions that can cause a fish to swim oddly, that usually get labelled as "swim bladder", and have different causes and treatments. Read this answer he gives a little further down in the search results, when you actually click through and read what he wrote:

"The fish either has air trapped in its digestive tract, or has a swim bladder problem.
Stop feeding dry food for a few days and use frozen (but defrosted) instead. If the fish still floats after being fed frozen foods for a week, it has a swim bladder problem. If the fish swims normally after the frozen food, it is air and you will need to reduce the dry food in its diet, or wet the dry food before feeding."

Same advice he gave me when I posted about my gravid guppy, who is alive and well and swimming normally right now BTW.

And third search result down, without even having to click through:
"No. Fish don't get constipated. It's a mammal/ human problem caused by lack of fibre and lack of water. Swim bladder problems are rare in fish and most of the fish that allagedly have swim bladder problems actually have air in their intestines and are fine after they fart it out. Dropsy is... "

You have no idea whether this play referred to is suffering from ammonia poisoning, trapped air, some bacterial infection, or has "swim bladder disease". You just assumed it was, looked for highlights from Colin's advice without understanding it, and told OP to euthanise and that there is no cure. You don't even know what he's trying to cure, since we don't know what is making the fish swim this way.

Same as the other day when you and others were telling someone to use Colin's salt water treatment, in a newly cycled tank that had only had fish in it for two days. Without even knowing the water test results yet. And admitted that you didn't even know why salt is used. After some more questioning, it turned out the ammonia levels were at 2ppm. The fish were suffering from the water quality/ammonia burns, and salt would have made things far worse, not better. Colin doesn't recommend salt treatment willy nilly, it has a purpose and it's not always suitable.

 

[Ch4rlie]

Ok, my first instinct about this, is the fact that you have an auto feeder for feeding while you are away.

Auto feeders can be unreliable sometimes, timer sticks, dumps all of the food too fast or too many feeds in one go due to sticking/jamming and so on and so forth.

Overfeeding can lead to a fish that looks like it has swim bladder disease, in fact I have known fish to be completely floating looking like it’s dead but simply put, it had overfed and is full of gas/air usually from overfeeding or dry food that’s not been soaked or similar.

So as few other members already said, don’t feed / fast for a few days,healthy fish will very easily survive for 3-5 days without food so they will be fine for 2 days fasting.

This gives the fishes body a good chance to recover and get swim bladder back to normal.

There could well be another few causes for this swim bladder but that’s my 2 cents worth of thought anyway.

Certainly do not need to euthanise for swim bladder without trying all other avenues first as it is a very treatable issue , euthanising should always be a very, very last resort if nothing else works.

And as for the 0.25 ammonia readings, I concur this is likely to be ammonium (ammonium is much less toxic than ammonia so it is unlikely to affect any livestock), fairly common to have false readings on API test kit due to ammonium. But do be sure to test both the tank water AND tap water (separate tests of course) to ensure it is ammonium likely from tap water rather than a potential issue with tank water parameters.

 

[Chad]

Ok, my first instinct about this, is the fact that you have an auto feeder for feeding while you are away.

This is in keeping with my first bullet point on air gulping.

 

[AdoraBelle Dearheart]

Oh and OP, if you get a basic, cheap sponge filter and air pump, you can do a seeded cycle for your quarantine tank. Just dip the new sponge into the tank water, then remove the mechanical media from the filter on your established tank (or the sponge if it's a sponge filter) then squeeze that onto the new sponge. You could also move a handful of substrate over from your established tank to help. Basically you're just transferring some of both the kinds of bacteria needed to process ammonia and nitrites, so it's far quicker than cycling a tank from scratch. It's almost an instant cycle; the bacteria you transferred just need some ammonia to feed on (which your fish will provide) and a little time for the bacterial colony to grow large enough to handle whatever bioload is in the quarantine tank.

Of course you still need to do water tests, water changes, and keep an eye since while it will quickly be a cycled tank, it still won't be an established tank, but it's very useful when you already have an established tank you can take beneficial bacteria from, and need a quarantine tank sharpish. Hopefully your platy will recover quickly and this won't be anything contagious, but it's useful to know since diseases can happen at any time and spread rapidly, so knowing how to quickly cycle a quarantine tank is handy.

 

[PheonixKingZ]

I will refrain from making such further posts...

 

[Essjay]

Oh and OP, if you get a basic, cheap sponge filter and air pump, you can do a seeded cycle for your quarantine tank. Just dip the new sponge into the tank water, then remove the mechanical media from the filter on your established tank (or the sponge if it's a sponge filter) then squeeze that onto the new sponge. You could also move a handful of substrate over from your established tank to help. Basically you're just transferring some of both the kinds of bacteria needed to process ammonia and nitrites, so it's far quicker than cycling a tank from scratch. It's almost an instant cycle; the bacteria you transferred just need some ammonia to feed on (which your fish will provide) and a little time for the bacterial colony to grow large enough to handle whatever bioload is in the quarantine tank.

Of course you still need to do water tests, water changes, and keep an eye since while it will quickly be a cycled tank, it still won't be an established tank, but it's very useful when you already have an established tank you can take beneficial bacteria from, and need a quarantine tank sharpish. Hopefully your platy will recover quickly and this won't be anything contagious, but it's useful to know since diseases can happen at any time and spread rapidly, so knowing how to quickly cycle a quarantine tank is handy.

And also buy a bunch of elodea/anacharis and leave it floating in the tank. It will take up a lot of ammonia made by the fish in there just in case the seeding doesn't transfer quite enough bacteria. Sort of belt and braces approach.

 

[AdoraBelle Dearheart]

I will refrain from making such further posts...

I don't mean to be hard on you, I know you mean well. But you have to be cautious when it comes to diagnosing and suggesting treatment. Read Colin's advice closely, and link it by all means, but don't just assume one remedy applies to any situation, that's all I'm saying.

 

[Retired Viking]

I will refrain from making such further posts...

Hang in there @PheonixKingZ you were trying to help, it is a learning process for us all.

 

[FishGuest5123]

Hang in there @PheonixKingZ you were trying to help, it is a learning process for us all.

I agree. If we don’t point out your errors and correct you, how are you going to learn the proper information? We’ve all learned this way. That’s why I always notify you when offering accurate info. So you won’t make the same mistake again.One more thing, if you have no knowledge of the topic, it’s OK to move on to the next post or to say I don’t know. I do it all the time. None of us know the answer to every post.