Firemouth Cichlid, bloated, breathing heavy, breeding tube protruding. Egg Bound? Infection of some kind?

[sim1]

It has been a bit bloated for about a month, however, in the last couple days, it has gotten worse. At first, the firemouth was hiding more often, its mouth was stuck open all the time. I thought it was gill fluke. Treated the whole tank with Praziquantel and Levamisole. Treatment finished 2 weeks ago. The parameters of the tank are perfect. Nitrates have never gone above 30 ppm, all other fish are doing good; the tank is 1 year old. Its tankmates are another female convict cichlid and a bosmani rainbowfish. Should I treat it with Epsom salt? or an antibiotic of some kind? Im in Australia so metro is a prescription medication.

 

[Colin_T]

Is the fish eating normally or at all?
What does its poop look like?

When fish suddenly bloat up, breath heavily and stop eating, they have a major internal problem (usually organ failure caused by bacteria, quite often TB). There's no cure if it has organ failure and has stopped eating and the fish usually dies within 24-48 hours of showing these symptoms. Euthanasia is the normal recommendation if it has stopped eating.

If it's still eating and doing normal coloured poop, then an Epsom salts bath might help or it could just be full of eggs.

The heavy breathing is usually associated with major internal pain and usually indicates bad things (death is on its way).

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Epsom salts bath can be done several times a day. I'm not `100% on dose rates but think it's 1 heaped tablespoon of magnesium sulphate for 20 litres of water. You put the fish in it for 15-30 minutes then put it back in the tank.

Use tank water for the Epsom salts bath. Have an air stone bubbling away in it.

Care must be taken when catching or lifting any fish out of water especially if it has an internal problem. The weight of the body lifted out of water can cause damaged organs in the body to get squashed and damaged even more.

If you have to move a sick fish out of the tank, carefully catch it in a net but keep it in water. Put a container in the water under the fish and lift the fish and net up in the container. Then put the container into the bucket with Epsom salts and let the fish swim out.

Epsom salts normally needs to be dissolved in hot water. Do this in a small container of water and add that liquid to the bigger bucket for treatment. Make sure the water in the treatment bucket isn't too hot for the fish.

 

[jaylach]

As a note the initial post throws up a security warning in Firefox at the top of the post. Since I'm a bit of a security freak I have no choice but to bring this up. Here is the warning and a link to what it means... It does not mean that the source is dangerous but, while that is possible, it is more likely that it is a case where the source site does not allow embedding in another site such as a forum.

Website will not allow Firefox to display the page if another site has embedded it | Mozilla Support

This page explains the error: "Website will not allow Firefox to display the page if another site has embedded it"

support.mozilla.org

 

[Essjay]

I use a different browser and I see just this "imgur.com refused to connect".