Feeling A Bit Disheartened...

[manwithnofish]

If you have to preform a water change during a med course, you just add the correct amount of med back to the water removed.

If you don't mind my asking, what's the purpose of this. Do you add the water removed back to the tank? That doesn't make sense to me. I'm clearing missing something here.

 

[jpjagged]

If you have to preform a water change during a med course, you just add the correct amount of med back to the water removed.

If you don't mind my asking, what's the purpose of this. Do you add the water removed back to the tank? That doesn't make sense to me. I'm clearing missing something here.

when you remove the water that was in the tank with the medicine, you are removing the medicine with it... therefore add the correct dosage back into the tank for the amount of water that you replace/d back into the tank

 

[Miss Wiggle]

Have you guys/girls ever had to deal with a particularly vicious and/or infectious disease/parasite, which despite you doing everything you possibly could, it still claimed fish lives?

yup definatley, know how harsh it is.


i was setting up a lovely angel tank at one point, buying them as juvi's and growing them up myself. I'd hand picked my angels, looked out for beautiful specimins and so on. Then must have mis-judged the health of one, took it home and within about 3 days it wiped out virtually everything in the tank, did try and medicate but with only a couple of days there wasn't time to try much. Fish would literally look fine in the morning, I'd come home from work and find a couple more dead. No symptoms no nothing. Pretty sure it was bacterial but it just wiped them out all except one angel who i somehow managed to save.

It's properly gutting!

 

[CFC]

A couple of years ago i had an outbreak of Velvet which through transfer from shared equipment managed to get into 5 of my tanks and wiped out over half of my fish collection within a week, i've had bacterial infections wipe whole tanks twice before as well so i know just how disheartening it can be. With bacterial infections even quarantining fish for several months isn't a sure fire way of avoiding them, bacteria can lay dormant in seemingly healthy fish for years with the fishes immune system keeping them in check and then suddenly an extra bit of stress gives the bacteria the upper hand and you have a major outbreak on your hands, the only sure way of avoiding bacterial infections are good husbandry and swift quarentine of any fish that shows any sign of illness before the disease can spread. Bacterial infections do seem more common in farmed fish than wild caught as the over stocked mass producing farms are a perfect breeding ground for bacteria (just look at dwarf gouramis) but even wild fish can bring nasty infectious bacteria in with them which they pick up while in the holding facilities at either end of their journey.

With the strict controls on anti biotic treatments in the UK conventional off the shelf medications have little to no effect once the bacteria have a hold on the fish and treatment can only prevent further infection by destroying bacteria in the water column, unfortunately by the time medication is administered usually every fish in the tank is infected as most people are reluctant to reach for strong medications until they are sure there is a problem. For expensive live stock you can get anti biotic medications prescribed from a specialist vets but in all honesty unless the fish is valued in the hundreds of pounds and has a good chance of surviving the medication it just isn't worth the expense.

If the infection cannot be cured then the only options are to allow the remaining livestock to live out their natural lives and not add any new fish to the tank until all the original stock and their offspring has died (or been moved to another tank) or to euthanise all the remaining stock and start again after sterilising the tank and all equipment and media.

 

[Tokis-Phoenix]

If such bacterial diseases can infect fish without showing any symptoms for months, do you think it would just be better that if when i bought fish in the future, while they are in quarantine i should just medicated them for a range of diseases and parasites regardless of whether they are showing symptoms or not to help ensure that the fish are carrying no diseases/parasites? The bacterial disease is still claiming lives in the tank, yesterday i lost a platy, and tpday another platy has started showing the symptoms- i think i may just euthanize it considering how poor the survival rate of fish infected with this disease is anyway.

 

[CFC]

I wouldn't treat fish for parasites without any symptoms unless you collected them from the wild yourself, a good exporter will have "de-bugged" the fish before shipping them so treating them for nothing will just stress them necessarily and off the shelf anti bacterial medications are ineffective in most cases anyway.
If you can then it is certainly a good idea to quarantine new fish for a couple of months so you can be sure that they are as disease free as possible but even then hidden diseases could still infect your aquarium if stress levels are elevated by bullying or poor water quality, there is no 100% certain way of avoiding diseases and the more fish you keep the greater the risk of a disease outbreak is, but good husbandry and a varied diet which includes plenty of live or frozen foods helps a long way to preventing diseases.

 

[Miss Wiggle]

i agree CFC, although I'd say 'good husbandry and a varied appropriate diet'

not all fish will thrive with meaty food, but yes in principle good nutrition and tank maintenance is the key to prevention. There is a limit to how much risk mitigation is sensible and practical for most fishkeepers.

 

[manwithnofish]

Keep you chin up chap and get back in there. You can't become Manwithnofish, because I'm already him.

 

[Tokis-Phoenix]

Its just such a shame that there isn't anyway you can really 100% know for sure that a fish isn't carrying anything nasty. This bacterial disease has just left me feeling so stressed and miserable over my fish so much the time, i just don't want to have another incident like this.
I do take many measure's though towards keeping my fish happy and healthy, like feeding them varied appropriate diets, doing regular decent sized water changes, not keeping tank lights on for excessive amounts of time, ensuring that filtration is more than capable of filtering the tank, offering fish plenty of hiding places and planting and stuff to help keep them happy and de-stressed, making sure substrate in tank is always clean, making sure that the room their tanks in is generally very quiet and clean etc etc.

The only fish i have ever really had problems with in this hobby is platys and guppys. I really like the small colorful fish, but they just seem to be so disease ridden at pet shops all the time- no other fish has ever given me as many problems as guppys and platys (i have plenty of other fish which have never fallen ill in their entire lives, or fish which have fallen ill just once or twice but have healed quickly and well after being medicated), i just can't trust pet shops to ever sell healthy ones anymore now- god knows why people feed their prized predatory fish fish like guppys, they're just so disease ridden at pet shops, i wouldn't feed a predatory fish pet shop bought guppys or similar fish- there's just so much risk of them carrying diseases and stuff .

Keep you chin up chap and get back in there. You can't become Manwithnofish, because I'm already him.

Thanks .

 

[cheesy feet]

I here you, it really is disheartening when something like this happens, really sorry for your losses.

Bacterial infections are the worst.My texas cichlid got what looked to be a tumorous white growth which expanded rapidly, therefore it was bacterial?and died within 4 days of the first sign, treatment did nothing.My sevs got internal bacteria something and died soon after, as seen- http/www.fishforums.net/content/forum/19...Golden-Severum/ , and my convict got something similar, these I believe were introduced through live bloodworm

i just can't trust pet shops to ever sell healthy ones anymore now- god knows why people feed their prized predatory fish fish like guppys, they're just so disease ridden at pet shops, i wouldn't feed a predatory fish pet shop bought guppys or similar fish- there's just so much risk of them carrying diseases and stuff .

Anyone who buys feeder guppy's is a bit of a fool.With a 20gallon tank you can breed 100's each month, and then you know exactly what you are getting...Silly people, your a 100% right though.

 

[CFC]

Serious predator keepers dont feed their fish things like guppies from fish shops, most use dead human grade food fish and if they really need to use live feeders they breed from their own stock and usually fish like Cichlids (or in my own case snakeheads) which produce much larger spawns.

Commercially mass bred fish are always going to be time bombs in the tank, the poor conditions of far eastern fish farms are a perfect conditions for diseases to spread.

 

[Gill]

I really feel for you Toki.
I lost the whole tank with Such Beuatiful fish within a week. 1 day fine then Bam!!!!! Dead the next. Couldn't do much as it came on so fast. It was too hard to get my Snails and Shrimps out of the tank without tearing it apart and that would have caused the disease to spread even quicker by stressing the fish. so had to watch them drop every day. I eventually tore it up an took my surviving snails and shrimps out and medicated them as best as i could to save them. Thankfully my Huge Female Purple Apple snail survived and is slowly coming back to her old form.

It was heartbreaking to watch as Mum and the Wife would tell me they are suffering and they would tell me what died when i got home from work.
They loved watching the fish and always commenting on them and told me what they would get up during the day.

I am now in the process of starting again and after spending so much making it look perfect it is horrible.

I have loads of plants coming this week to redo the scaping.


I am still going to stick to my regime of good water, natural products and adding leaves to the tank. so that the fish graze on them and gain nureients.

 

[Tokis-Phoenix]

Thanks for the support everyone, i really appreciate it .

Its also interesting/worrying to to know that there are others here that have had to deal with these vicious bacterial diseases infecting their fish, i wonder how common these diseases are becoming in the hobby now?
I think in this day and age, the quarantine/hospital tank is evermore just as essential piece of equipment in the average fish keepers kit as a fish net and bottle of dechlorinater etc. I'm actually thinking of trying to find space for another tank right now, so i can have a separate quarantine and hospital tank rather than just using the same tank for both purposes, so i can quarantine fish for months instead of weeks at a time with much more ease .

I really feel for you Toki.
I lost the whole tank with Such Beuatiful fish within a week. 1 day fine then Bam!!!!! Dead the next. Couldn't do much as it came on so fast.

Thats exactly how it was like for me, it just came about so fast, i wasn't completely sure what it was, i thought "surely a bacterial disease can't kill fish so quickly?"- at first i even thought that perhaps some nasty chemical had got into the tank or perhaps one of the filters had broken down and leaked ammonia into the tank or something like that etc- but the water quality test results were normal and the filters were working fine, and lots of regular water changes didn't seem to improve anything. This has to be one of the worst things i have ever had to treat my fish for- it makes parasites and diseases like whitespot and fish tb look like a minor inconvenience in comparison.

 

[CFC]

In comparison whitespot IS just a minor inconvenience, just raise the temperature to 31c the minute you see a spot and leave it there for a couple of weeks and thats it the parasite is gone, infestations are a bit harder and require meds but at least white spot meds work. Fish TB is bacterial and 100% lethal, some fish may appear to recover but will be carriers of the disease and just reinfect new tankmates.

The reason most bacterial infections are so lethal is that they start inside the fish, usually in the kidneys, and you don't see the external signs until the fish is already doomed.

 

[Tokis-Phoenix]

That furanol link is in euro now it was in pounds yesterday.
Here another link if you want to buy the med.
[URL="http/www.onlineaquariumstore.com/cgi-bin...;PR=-1&TB=A"]http/www.onlineaquariumstore.com/cgi-bin...;PR=-1&TB=A[/URL]

I've just noticed that the writing on the packet is in another language, does it have dosage instructions in English anywhere on the med do you know?