Problems just keep comming

[thomas]

This is a seperate problem from my oscar in my other thread. Today I noticed our smallest tank's fish had whitespot, the whitespots only showed up today as I took a good look at them only yesterday.

All but one of the fish are lying motionless on the bottem of the tank (all only lightly breathing).

It's a small tank with fish that have been in there years (except one we added months ago). There are about 5 of them.

Since I don't have a battery or spare tape for my camera I can't upload a direct picture of them, but I can tell you they have whitespot and most arn't moving.
I could however upload a picture of the tank size here.

The temperature of the tank is very low (17 C) and the pH is 6ish. These fish are out of a pond we have.

I have read to increese the temperature (how much but?) and too maybe add salt (but I am not sure how good these species are with it. And theres also medication (which I will have to get).

The are 3 mollys and 2 swordtails, one several years old.

How much salt should I add if any based on species and basicly, what should I do.

EDIT: It's a 6 gallon (24 liter) tank.
EDIT: Also, the only change we have made to the tank in the past 2 days was we added a small pipe thing for the air pump (I am not sure what to call it, a plastic green tube which the air travals through. It was washed before putting it in I beleive but there hasn't been any change to that tank in months prior to that.

 

[TorPeteO]

Hi,

have you had these fish with the same conditions in that tank for years? 17 C seems pretty low for tropical fish like swords and mollys, perhaps you should raise your temperature gradually into the mid 20s celsius. Usually, I keep mine around 22 C, but heating the tank to a greater extent shortens the life span of the Ich bacteria. Also, the salt you've mentioned is aquarium salt, as opposed to marine salt for saltwater tanks, and my swords handled the aquarium salt very well when I put it in their tank. When I had an ich outbreak, I used QuICK Cure from my LFS, and after following the directions on the bottle I managed to get rid of the Ick after a few treatments.

HTH, good luck.

 

[thomas]

Yes, they have been in cold water all there lifes. They originally came from a pond, and there parents (which we had too) came from a horrable pond enviroment.