Wolfrain6
New Member
Okay, so we are fish novices, and my daughter won a goldfish a few years back at a carnival. She actually won two, but one died. She replaced him and he died too. So, Maurice (Mo) has survived and we are very attached to him. He’s about the size of a large hand now. He’s done awesome all this time. Even after three other goldfish were added again later, and a pleco. My kid wouldn’t stop adding fish even though I told her not to, and then I got stuck with all these fish in a too small (50gal) tank. Other than having to do very frequent water changes to keep all those fish okay until we saved up for a bigger tank or a pond, they were all very healthy. Until she dumped another flipping pleco in there without quarantine. I don’t know what that fish brought into our tank, but it died and brought two of our goldfish down with it. Then our older pleco started having obvious issues and a prolapsed anus to boot. I freaked out (cause I’m super attached to her too) and did a strong salt treatment, fasted her, then gave her some cucumber and peas. She seems okay now. I also ended up treating the whole tank for lice and basic worms and with an anti bacterial and fungal deal cause I couldn’t seem to get it under control just with taking fish out and putting them in a hospital tank and treating individually. And I’m pretty sure that little pleco that started this plague had at least a fungal infection based on how she appeared. I did a big water change to get the meds and salt out of the tank last night, and all the fish appeared to be doing pretty decently except for the big goldfish missing some scales. I thought it was from when they were all sick and he was thrashing around more. But he had been chill for a while, so I thought he was on the mend. After this water change he started going nuts and has been swimming at ramming speed and tearing through everything in the tank very aggressively. He has nearly knocked his tank lids off, and is exhausting himself. Then he will lay there gasping and sitting all crooked. The water temp was the same as it always is when we do changes, and he’s usually fine with changes, even big ones. And if anything, it may have been a little cooler than what we keep the tank, cause we keep the tank at the higher end of their preferred degree ranges due to the pleco being inappropriately in there with the goldfish. So, she’s on the low end and they’re in the high end- hoping for a happy medium compromise until we can better fix the issue with new tank options for them (since the teen/adult kid kinda just screwed us with this situation and didn’t do enough research before buying things and trusted the store folk). I have never treated for Flukes before and I’m starting to wonder if maybe that could be the culprit or one of them anyways. Anyways- I don’t want to lose what remaining grandfish we have left, especially the two that we have grown very attached to. Any advice (besides needing bigger/separate tanks, as we know that needs to come but isn’t possible right now) would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. We have tried treating one thing at a time, since we didn’t know what it was. But I think there has been more than one thing happening here unfortunately. I don’t want to over treat them, I just don’t know what else to do for them at this point. Thanks
