Ragged Fins On Black Goldfish After Cleaning Tank

[crmpicco]

Hi All,

I have cleaned the tank for my two goldfish this week and after putting the fish back in I have noticed that one of them has ragged fins. It is a black goldfish and i've never noticed this before with this fish.

Can anyone advise a reason as to why this would happen? The other fish (gold) is absolutely fine.

Thanks,
Picco

 

[WILDER]

How many gallons is the tank.
How many fish and which type.
Water stats in ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, and ph.

 

[Colin_T]

ragged fins in goldfish is just about always caused by poor water quality.
You mentioned you took the fish out to clean the tank. You don't need to remove the fish to clean the tank. The best thing to do is simply syphon or scoop out a 1/3 of the tank water and replace it with clean water that is free of chlorine and has a similar temperature to the tank.
If you want to clean the gravel get a "Gravel Cleaner" available from any petshop. They have a syphon hose and a pipe. The pipe gets pushed into the gravel while the water is draining out the hose. The gravel circulates in the pipe before dropping back down and the dirt gets removed with the water.
You don't need to gravel clean all the tank each time you do a water change. Normally you just gravel clean about 1/3 to 1/2 of the gravel. Then do the rest of the gravel next time.

Is there a filter running on the tank and if so, how long has it been running for, and when & how did you last clean it?

the more unusual the goldfish the more prone to problems. Black moors are more likely to have issues before common fantail or comet goldfish.

 

[crmpicco]

Hi there,

Thanks for these replies. As for nitrate levels and things like that I dont have the necessary equipment to meter these values.

The next time I cleaned the fish out I did remove the fish and put them in a temporary bowl in their water from their main tank, but did not empty the entire tank. I had read (somewhere, can't quite remember now) that you SHOULDN'T remove all the water from the tank when cleaning it. I removed the vast majority down the the level of the gravel/stones that I couldn't scoop out.

I have now done the similar thing this afternoon and there is a lot of fish waste left over on the corners and along the bottom of the tank. How do I get rid of this waste? It doesn't look nice and it almost looks as if I haven't cleaned the tank out at all

Thanks for advising what type of goldfish my black fish "Isa" is, she is a "Black Moor" - this pic from Wikipedia is pretty close to what she looks like:

Look forward to hearing back from you.

Cheers,
Picco

 

[saph.st24]

hi

the gravel cleaner will remove the waste and some water, you want to remove 10-20% of the tank water once a week and replace the water with dechlorinated water
you need to get test kits for ammonia, nitrites,nitrates and ph