Lost an L199 pleco (trigger warning: dead fish photos)

[Gypsum]

It's been a while since I have posted here. All my tanks have been doing well and just pottering along.

Until this week. One of my L199s (Hypancistrus furunculus) looked a bit pale and off two days ago. But hard to see what was really going on because plecos hide, though these guys normally pop out at feeding time. We did a couple water changes. Today, I saw the fish, not hiding, and it looked terrible. Its tail and anal fins had completely deteriorated and its pec fins did not look good. It wriggled when I prodded it with a net, but barely. I promptly caught it. It had a lot of red around its anus and blood coming out. But no worms (or nothing that was obviously a worm). Then I PTS with clove oil because it was pretty far gone. Poor wee guy.

Tank is 125L. It has three L199s (four including the deceased one), some number of Corydoras habrosus, some pygmy cories (they breed... I have no idea how many are in there now), one lone Corydoras carlae, and four CW045 cories. I run three powerheads to make it as river-like as possible. I do a 70-ish% water change once per week. Tank has been running in this configuration for almost three years now. We have not added any new fish or plants in like a year. Everyone else in the tank that I can see looks fine, though I can't see much of the other three plecos.

Only change is that our fish have not been getting as much live food as they used to because life is complicated, and the best fish shop for buying it is a bit of a mission to get to. So we haven't gotten down there in a while.

All parameters are copacetic. Ammonia, nitrate, nitrite are all 0, which is normal. PH is 6.0, which is normal for us. Very soft water area.

Any ideas? Do I need to panic and treat the tank with something? Is it just one of those unlucky things?

 

[ChasingFish]

Have no idea! Sorry, I see your water quality is good, water changes good, no new tankmates introduced in a year - so unlikely caught disease. Could it have been beaten up? I don't know much about these plecos, I don't even know if they fight with each other. Just wondering since the fins and tail look a bit chewed up, and you said it was bleeding.

 

[Gypsum]

They usually get along but can have spats with one another, so it's entirely possible that it could have been injured, then got some kind of infection.

Seen at least two of the remaining plecos. They look fine.

 

[Byron]

I'm tagging @TwoTankAmin because he knows the loricariids quite well. There are other members who do as well, but this name popped into my head and these days I'm lucky if I remember any name.

Additional info that might be relevant...what are they being fed? This is a species that is omnivorous and needs "meat" as much r more than veggies. Mine some years ago seemed to thrive on sinking foods that I fed the cories.

Other members will have more no doubt on the aggression issue, but males of most loricarids can sometimes get very territorial.

 

[Gypsum]

They get sinking pellets and wafers, primarily the black fly larvae Fluval Bugbites and Omega shrimp pellets.

Like I said in the OP, they used to get live worms about once per week, but we've gotten lax about that in the last few months because the worms have become hard to get.

Now and then I wing in the occasional courgette/zuccini because Hypancistrus are mostly carnivorous, but not entirely. I read Rebecca Bentley saying somewhere that they are a little bit omnivorous.

 

[TwoTankAmin]

Very hard to tell here. If it is a female I would say egg bound, maybe. But the blood means something serious going on inside. So it may alsi be a digestive blockage. This can be caused by a number of things, so there is no way to tell from the pictures.

It could be something as basic as cancer causing the blockage to parasites etc. I would take a microscope and some knowledge to figure this out from the corpse.

So, the one danger is that whatever got the fish is something that is contagious. This means you need to closely monitor the tank for a bit. Fish which are ill or injured will change their behavior and often their appearance. Their colors (even if these are just Black and white)may fade.

As fishkeepers we tend to forget that animals, including fish, can have heart attacks, strokes or be born with genetic defects etc. Often these are not visible to us and do not begin to show up until the fish has gotten older and bigger. Years back I lost one of my bigger clown loaches. It never showed any symptoms or damge, I simply died without any warning.

At that time fish forums and chats dominated as social media was barely beginning. One of the member of a site where I was a mod in chat and who was a seller and importer who knew about this sort of stuff had me freeze the dead fish and then ship it to him. He did an autopsy. His verdict was that everything looked normal inside the fish. He concluded it must have been something like a heart attack or stroke which were beyond his ability to diagnose post-mortem.

Diseases and parasite4s etc. re the hardest part of this hobby because there are no fish vets and no easy ways to diagnose and treat most things. Ich, fin rot or camallanus worms are easy to spot, but most things are not. I wish I could be more helpful here, but this is the hardest part of keeping fish.