Medications and things

itiwhetu

Naturally First
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Please, slow up. There are a lot of threads at the moment with members throwing things at their tanks. Just for the fish's sake slow up and think carefully about what you are putting in your tank and why. Take your time before adding anything into your tank. There are a lot of products out there that claim all sorts of things but deliver little. Look closely at what you are doing before adding anything to your tank.
 
If you go into a petshop to ask for help with a potential fish health issue and they recommend anything, PLEASE read the ingredients as you might just kill your fish

API add essential oils to some of their products. Essential oils work on humans, not on fish.

API Stress Coat with Aloe Vera is deadly to fish. No matter how many water changes you do, you will never dilute or remove the Aloe Vera and it gradually builds up a residue which blocks then paralyzes the gills. It can take months to do it but the effect will be fatal to your fish.

API Melafix (and their other "fix" potions) contain Tee Tree, this is deadly to surface breathing fish such as Gourami and Betta. The Tee Tree destroys the labrynth organ that the fish needs to breathe. It is a painful suffocating death.

Please do not buy anything without checking the ingredients even if pushed by the shopworker...don't buy them unless you have researched the ingredients thoroughly.

Medications of any kind should never be the first stop...they should always be the last resort and only used with the guidance of someone who is qualified such as a vet.
 
I’m scared of chemicals don’t like them , particularly ones that make water clear or detoxifying ammonia... just change some water seems softer to me
 
First off, there is a line between a medication and a remedy. There's a shop down the street where a guy dresses up in a lab coat and sell naturopathic and homeopathic remedies at high prices as remedies for whatever ails you. I know he has his followers, and his products will have followers here. Untested, unregulated, heavily marketed remedies rule in our hobby though, and companies like his push supposed 'natural' cures to the point where where fish remedy companies add them to their products. Aloe, tea tree oil - they have their uses, but not for fish.
If you research Melafix, the active ingredient is a scientifically studied and proven anti bacterial. If you research further, it's been studied at concentrations far far greater than what's in the product. 0.1% alcohol won't disinfect anything.
Cannabis is legal here, and my neighbours seem to believe it has magical medical properties far beyond the real benefits shown by research. If it's ever legalized in a large market like the US, I'll bet there will be cannabis extracts in fish remedies before you know it. It won't matter if they help the fish. They'll make us feel we're helping.

So what are the real meds? Salt, used wisely, is an important chemical for aquariums. Used wisely. Used badly, it's a disaster. Mutagenic dyes are proven and safe for us weapons against easily identified parasites. Praziquantel works against gut worms. Nematodes (the red 'worms') need a different family of drugs - flubendazole, etc. Antibiotics work if you have the lab training (I don't) to be able to identify the bacteria you are fighting, or at least to know if it's gram positive or negative. The wrong antibiotic is useless.

Fish bodies are very complex, and most of the time, we have no clue what's wrong with them. The more experience we have, the more we know we don't know. Certainties are for self confident beginners. We can kill a parasite like Ich easily. Velvet is harder. Beyond that, we are just on the good side of asking the gods for favours or sacrificing snails to save our fish. We don't have many arms in our arsenal, and we have even less knowledge about that we are actually up against. Most of the supposedly natural remedies sold over the counter are unproven with fish and are designed to make us feel we're doing something.

Clean water, careful stocking, good filtration, planned set-ups = prevention. And whack that Ich quickly if it comes in on new fish, neutralize those chloramines and run a water change schedule.
 
If you go into a petshop to ask for help with a potential fish health issue and they recommend anything, PLEASE read the ingredients as you might just kill your fish

100% agree with this, but also want to add a caution to never just take the word of a fish stop worker on what may be wrong with your fish, and what products to buy. Far too many fish store employees really don't know much about fish, let alone fish disease. It's very easy to blag it and pretend they know what's wrong (and without knowledge and seeing your fish, only going on a verbal description, it really is only a guess at best) and sell you a product. If you come back and it hasn't worked, they can sell you another product...

First aid for any fish problem is water changes. Any healthy condition is easier for the fishes immune system to fight it off, and if there's a possibility of poor water conditions, contamination or pollution, then diluting it through water changes will buy your fish time while you look for help. As @AbbeysDad and @Colin_T say; "The solution to pollution is dilution." A large 50-70% water change is the very first step. Give the substrate a good clean while you're doing this. Then make a post here,

Make the post as detailed as possible. There's a template you can use in the pinned thread in the emergencies section. Taking most inexpensive fish to an aquatic specialist vet is out of the question for many people, understandably. So we have to do the best we can as hobbyists. We're lucky here to have @Colin_T here who is very experienced with fish and fish health, and can give you simple guidelines to treat the tank as a whole in a healthy way that will treat the most common fish illnesses, without resorting to throwing unknown chemical mixtures and potentially very harmful products into the tank, making things much worse than they originally were.
There is a tendency for people who are new to the hobby, who are enthusiastic and absolutely want the best for their fish, and are happy to spend the money to want to save them. That's a double edged sword. The willingness to want to help them is wonderful, but there is also a tendency to want quick solutions, misdiagnose the problem, and hope a medicine in a bottle will fix it. While some issues DO require medication (such as parasites), there are many more that really do not.

While Colin is wonderful with disease, there are also plenty of people here who are very knowledgeable about fish and have been in the hobby for a long time, experiencing many things. The vast majority of threads posted here where there is a health problem and fish are dying, the problem is actually with the water or the cycle. Most of us are able and willing to guide someone through how to fix that! We must make sure the water is the right and the cycle working properly first, to rule that out, before considering other health issues. So please post with as much detail about the tank, your maintenance schedule, stocking, new things added to the tank, etc. There are many people here eager to help!
 
The vast majority of threads posted here where there is a health problem and fish are dying, the problem is actually with the water or the cycle. Most of us are able and willing to guide someone through how to fix that! We must make sure the water is the right and the cycle working properly first, to rule that out, before considering other health issues. So please post with as much detail about the tank, your maintenance schedule, stocking, new things added to the tank, etc. There are many people here eager to help!
I agree wholeheartedly with the need for detail. The clue can be in things you don't suspect.

But I doubt the majority of early wipeouts are from things test kits can pick up. I know, heresy. I've nosed around a few warehouses holding many hundreds of tanks - the suppliers who often receive fish from the tropical farms and then distribute those fish to shops. One employee said the business side of the cheaper fish (the ones the chains like) is a race - will they die before they're sold? They tank them and try to get them out the next day if they can. It's all about turnover.

I've been in smaller warehouses too, and seen fantastically healthy fish, quarantined before sale and well cared for. The chains won't touch those places - too expensive. They only survive with specialty markets, and the higher end of the hobby.

Our hobby can be 'green' and environmentally oriented. We can have projects that do good. But the lack of respect for quality and fish health in that chase of the bottom line is not our finest moment. Yes, we kill fish by not doing our homework and not respecting the cycle in tanks. But when I read threads where someone bought a bag of glofish, neons, guppies or other mass produced fish and had then die in 24 hours, I don't suggest a test kit. If we were getting the kind of fish we got before the fishfarms became mega-companies listed on the stock exchange and playing to a global market, then yes, we could blame ourselves for not testing the water.

What do you do? We can admit there's a problem. We can try for a blanket solution, like working with a (not cheap) test kit. I guess the middle ground is to suggest not throwing in Ich meds for bacterial infections, etc.
 
As @AbbeysDad and @Colin_T say; "The solution to pollution is dilution." A large 50-70% water change is the very first step. Give the substrate a good clean while you're doing this.
I just want to say that @Colin_T STOLE the saying from me... Never mind that I stole (err borrowed) it from someone else many years ago!

I'll confess that I personally know very little first hand about diseases and treatments. I maintain high quality water and am careful about new fish introductions (which happens only rarely) as I focus on breeding, growing out, and selling Swordtails (about 350 a year). I do agree that maintaining a high water quality along with the proper feeding of high quality foods (including some live or frozen foods) promotes the healthiest fish with immune systems that can combat disease. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure".

Here is a very good article on my website written by my friend Greg Sage of Select Aquatics of Erie Co. about Dealing with Fish Disease. ><((((º>
 
But I doubt the majority of early wipeouts are from things test kits can pick up. I know, heresy. I've nosed around a few warehouses holding many hundreds of tanks - the suppliers who often receive fish from the tropical farms and then distribute those fish to shops. One employee said the business side of the cheaper fish (the ones the chains like) is a race - will they die before they're sold? They tank them and try to get them out the next day if they can. It's all about turnover.

I might be overstating it by saying that most threads turn out to be an uncycled tank/ammonia spikes etc, but it does happen pretty often, and most of us can talk someone through something like that. Then, as you say, we might find underlying disease too. Especially with the fish you mentioned!
When I started in the hobby about three years ago, I just wanted a little 15g guppy/shrimp tank. I always do my research before acquiring a pet, and I'd been maintaining my elderly father's tank for a while as well, so I threw myself into research while I did a seeded cycle on the 15g using media and substrate from my dad's tank. I watched dozens of youtube fish channels, read around places like here, read books, learned about the cycle, bought an API test kit, bought live plants and took cuttings from dad's, etc etc. Borrowed some of his baby mollies to try in the 15g eventually to help make sure it was cycled. Once it was testing perfectly, I went to the store and got a trio of guppies.

My folks were in the aquatic business for a long time, so I thought guppies were still the hardy beginner fish they always were known to be, I'm sure you remember when that was their reputation. But they've been out of the business for 30 odd years now, and didn't know how things have changed. I loved this trio of guppies, they were super pretty, looked healthy, then they died within 24 hours. Hadn't seen signs of illness, water was testing perfectly, 0/0/<10. Shop replaced them, the next ones died one by one over the next week or two. By my third attempt, while seeking advice on FB groups and not getting much help since my set up seemed fine, I finally was told that guppies are weak and unhealthy now, since being bred in giant fish farms, over medicated, raised in seawater, not quarantined, not well bred etc. I felt like a fish murderer though, and that perhaps I should give up. When the third group died, I decided to give it one more try, getting fish from a different store, and this time I got six females and two males. Of course, this time they all lived, and the six females began churning fry at a crazy rate! So I got more tanks...

But, after about six months, some where getting skinny and lethargic, and dying off. fry that were about 2 months old were dying. I was told worms were likely, used a generic wormer without results. Finally saw the red brush signs of camallanus, and learned about the right meds to treat them, and it was a pain to treat every tank!

So like many, I learned how important it is to quarantine new stock, and one thing I would medicate immediately is to worm any livebearers while in quarantine, with the right meds for round and flat worms. So yes, I agree with you, and I learned the hard way! I really almost gave up though, since I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong to lose all these guppies. I've since heard that if you buy guppies, that if you can get some fry before the originals die, then you're doing well, and the fry should be hardier than the parents were.
 
The very first thing I have ever done if the fish in a tank seem to be in trouble is a major water change. Provided the parameters (GH, pH and temperature here) are reasonably the same between tank and tap water, this can never harm the fish or the system, and an 80% W/C is good. While draining I do what tests I can...ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, pH. More than once I have had to do nothing further. Most of us are not qualified/knowledgeable biologists and we are in reality guessing much of the time, at least until we have the experience to know.
 
If I have any questions about the health of my fish - water change! I am absolutely with @Byron on that one. There is no better advice.

We can't identify most diseases, and we don't have access to the types of meds that would do the job even if we had that info. But we can easily give the fish a fighting chance by rapidly improving their conditions.

I wish I understood the diseases with guppies and neons. I suspect there are more fish viruses than we suspect as hobbyists, and a large crowded farm, like a human city, is ideal for spread. I don't think it's inbreeding. It could be from forced growth using antibiotics or hormones. Whatever it is, it's sad.
 
If you go into a petshop to ask for help with a potential fish health issue and they recommend anything, PLEASE read the ingredients as you might just kill your fish

API add essential oils to some of their products. Essential oils work on humans, not on fish.

API Stress Coat with Aloe Vera is deadly to fish. No matter how many water changes you do, you will never dilute or remove the Aloe Vera and it gradually builds up a residue which blocks then paralyzes the gills. It can take months to do it but the effect will be fatal to your fish.

API Melafix (and their other "fix" potions) contain Tee Tree, this is deadly to surface breathing fish such as Gourami and Betta. The Tee Tree destroys the labrynth organ that the fish needs to breathe. It is a painful suffocating death.

Please do not buy anything without checking the ingredients even if pushed by the shopworker...don't buy them unless you have researched the ingredients thoroughly.

Medications of any kind should never be the first stop...they should always be the last resort and only used with the guidance of someone who is qualified such as a vet.
Don’t get API medication. 🤷‍♂

Why do we not have a male shrugging, lol… :X
 
I maintain high quality water and am careful about new fish introductions (which happens only rarely) as I focus on breeding, growing out, and selling Swordtails (about 350 a year).

Now that I know that "the solution to pollution is dilution was "borrowed" by you in the first place, I won't feel guilty for using it myself ;) :lol:

Off topic, sorry, but I don't think I've ever seen your fish, would love to see some of the types of swordtails you keep! Please! :flowers:
 

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