Sore on silver dollar's side-newly planted tank

[Penelope .R]

I just planted my old community tank as a sort of experiment and it's going well. I used organic potting soil under sand and eco complete as the substrate, I was worried about it leeching ammonia into the water column but have had no issues since it's mostly Hornwort.
This silver dollar has had a mark on his side for a few days, I assumed he ran into something since I have some sharper pieces of tall driftwood in the tank.
But today I noticed the mark ends in a small sore that wasn't there before. I have pictures below.
It's early in the week but I'm going to go ahead and do a water change, and add some stress coat. I'd add a little salt but I have nirites and nirite eggs in the tank and don't want them to hatch. I also don't want to do anything to kill the plants if I can help it.

For now I'm keeping an eye on the water and the sore, I'm not too concerned, I feel like he just smacked himself against some Driftwood.

Here's some more on the tank and pictures are at the bottom-

Tank size: 65 gallons, narrow and tall.
tank age: 8 years
pH: stays around neutral but dips lower between water changes, never had a problem before.
ammonia: 0
nitrite: 0
nitrate: with weekly water changes it stays below 10
kH: around 40 ppm, I don't have a precise test, same goes for gH.
gH: between 30 and 60 ppm
tank temp: 78-83 Fahrenheit typically

The fish has a pink sore on his side towards his tail. He is acting completely fine otherwise and eats readily. I've been feeding him some boiled vegetables and veggie fish flakes, normal fish flakes too since it is a community tank.

I try to change the water once a week, every once in a while it'll go for two weeks, but I've never pushed it further and I've never gotten ammonia over 0 with the filter I'm using now.

I use seachem prime for the water but otherwise I avoid anything else. My filter is a hydor Canister filter.

Tank inhabitants: the four silver dollars share the tank with a kissing gourami, five Rosy barbs, 4 cory cats, 2 cardinal tetras, 4 celestial pearl danios, 1 pleco, and 3 kuhli loaches. It's a little overstocked, but all of these fish have lived together for over a year and I have not added anyone new.
Recently I had a dwarf gourami die of what I think was bloat, and the second started staying at the surface and breathing heavily. I posted about it and the possibility of TB was brought up. I put the gourami in isolation with a little salt in the water and he recovered fully. I now think he was being bullied by the kissing gourami, and he now lives in a tank by himself and is one of the most social fish I've ever had. I just thought I'd mention it since I haven't thrown out the possibility of my tank having TB because of how common it is in dwarf gouramis, even though he is fine now.

I just added new plants, Hornwort from another tank, crypts, java fern, valisneria, water sprite, and water spangles and duckweed from another tank. The silvers love eating the duckweed. I also added two large Driftwood pieces which I soaked and boiled ahead of time, and pieces of slate a cleaned and boiled as well. Also some lava rock, and the organic potting soil, I tested the potting soil in the 20 gallon I have my dwarf gourami in for a few months first and it didn't hurt anything there, the Hornwort is growing like a weed and the gourami loves it.

Here are the pictures

 

[StripySnailGirl04]

I just planted my old community tank as a sort of experiment and it's going well. I used organic potting soil under sand and eco complete as the substrate, I was worried about it leeching ammonia into the water column but have had no issues since it's mostly Hornwort.
This silver dollar has had a mark on his side for a few days, I assumed he ran into something since I have some sharper pieces of tall driftwood in the tank.
But today I noticed the mark ends in a small sore that wasn't there before. I have pictures below.
It's early in the week but I'm going to go ahead and do a water change, and add some stress coat. I'd add a little salt but I have nirites and nirite eggs in the tank and don't want them to hatch. I also don't want to do anything to kill the plants if I can help it.

For now I'm keeping an eye on the water and the sore, I'm not too concerned, I feel like he just smacked himself against some Driftwood.

Here's some more on the tank and pictures are at the bottom-

Tank size: 65 gallons, narrow and tall.
tank age: 8 years
pH: stays around neutral but dips lower between water changes, never had a problem before.
ammonia: 0
nitrite: 0
nitrate: with weekly water changes it stays below 10
kH: around 40 ppm, I don't have a precise test, same goes for gH.
gH: between 30 and 60 ppm
tank temp: 78-83 Fahrenheit typically

The fish has a pink sore on his side towards his tail. He is acting completely fine otherwise and eats readily. I've been feeding him some boiled vegetables and veggie fish flakes, normal fish flakes too since it is a community tank.

I try to change the water once a week, every once in a while it'll go for two weeks, but I've never pushed it further and I've never gotten ammonia over 0 with the filter I'm using now.

I use seachem prime for the water but otherwise I avoid anything else. My filter is a hydor Canister filter.

Tank inhabitants: the four silver dollars share the tank with a kissing gourami, five Rosy barbs, 4 cory cats, 2 cardinal tetras, 4 celestial pearl danios, 1 pleco, and 3 kuhli loaches. It's a little overstocked, but all of these fish have lived together for over a year and I have not added anyone new.
Recently I had a dwarf gourami die of what I think was bloat, and the second started staying at the surface and breathing heavily. I posted about it and the possibility of TB was brought up. I put the gourami in isolation with a little salt in the water and he recovered fully. I now think he was being bullied by the kissing gourami, and he now lives in a tank by himself and is one of the most social fish I've ever had. I just thought I'd mention it since I haven't thrown out the possibility of my tank having TB because of how common it is in dwarf gouramis, even though he is fine now.

I just added new plants, Hornwort from another tank, crypts, java fern, valisneria, water sprite, and water spangles and duckweed from another tank. The silvers love eating the duckweed. I also added two large Driftwood pieces which I soaked and boiled ahead of time, and pieces of slate a cleaned and boiled as well. Also some lava rock, and the organic potting soil, I tested the potting soil in the 20 gallon I have my dwarf gourami in for a few months first and it didn't hurt anything there, the Hornwort is growing like a weed and the gourami loves it.

Here are the pictures
View attachment 153271View attachment 153272

That looks bad. Ouch!

 

[Penelope .R]

That looks bad. Ouch!

Yeah, I don't know what to think of it, just hoping it heals up.

 

[Colin_T]

Ouch, that looks painful.

It appears the fish has taken a piece of skin off. You need something in the water to stop bacteria and fungus getting in. Whatever you use (salt, medication), it needs to be in the tank for a couple of weeks to allow this to heal over.

You can also do big daily water changes and gravel clean the substrate to help dilute the number of disease organisms in the tank. Clean the filter too.
Make sure any new water is free of chlorine/ chloramine before it's added to the tank.

 

[GaryE]

I'd interpret that as a bite.

 

[Penelope .R]

I'd interpret that as a bite.

A bite from what? I guess it's possible.

Ouch, that looks painful.

It appears the fish has taken a piece of skin off. You need something in the water to stop bacteria and fungus getting in. Whatever you use (salt, medication), it needs to be in the for a couple of weeks to allow this to heal over.

You can also do big daily water changes and gravel clean the substrate to help dilute the number of disease organisms in the tank. Clean the filter too.
Make sure any new water is free of chlorine/ chloramine before it's added to the tank.

Yeah, I feel bad for him.
I'll work on it, I'm due to clean the filter anyway. I can use salt, just wondering if it will kill my plants or hatch some of the nirite eggs? It is what it is, just curious. My silver dollars are my prized fish, this one is just over a year old, but my original two are about seven.

 

[Colin_T]

A bit of salt (1-2 heaped tablespoons per 20 litres of water) should not cause a nerite snail problem. Even if the eggs do hatch, the young are unlikely to survive.

Your plants will also be fine with the above dose rate of salt (1-2 heaped tablespoons per 20 litres of water).


-------------------
SALT
Using Salt to Treat Fish Health Issues.
For some fish diseases you can use salt (sodium chloride) to treat the ailment rather than using a chemical based medication. Salt is relatively safe and is regularly used in the aquaculture industry to treat food fish for diseases. Salt has been successfully used to treat minor fungal and bacterial infections, as well as a number of external protozoan infections. Salt alone will not treat whitespot (Ichthyophthirius) or Velvet (Oodinium) but will treat most other types of protozoan infections in freshwater fishes.

You can add rock salt (often sold as aquarium salt) or swimming pool salt to the aquarium at the dose rate of 1 heaped tablespoon per 20 litres of water. If there is no improvement after 48 hours you can double that dose rate so there is 2 heaped tablespoons of salt per 20 litres.

If you only have livebearers (guppies, platies, swordtails, mollies), goldfish or rainbowfish in the tank you can double that dose rate, so you would add 2 heaped tablespoons per 20 litres and if there is no improvement after 48 hours, then increase it so there is a total of 4 heaped tablespoons of salt per 20 litres.

Keep the salt level like this for at least 2 weeks but no longer than 4 weeks otherwise kidney damage can occur. Kidney damage is more likely to occur in fish from soft water (tetras, Corydoras, angelfish, Bettas & gouramis, loaches) that are exposed to high levels of salt for an extended period of time, and is not an issue with livebearers, rainbowfish or other salt tolerant species.

The salt will not affect the beneficial filter bacteria but the higher dose rate (4 heaped tablespoons per 20 litres) will affect some plants and some snails. The lower dose rate (1-2 heaped tablespoons per 20 litres) will not affect fish, plants, shrimp or snails.

After you use salt and the fish have recovered, you do a 10% water change each day for a week using only fresh water that has been dechlorinated. Then do a 20% water change each day for a week. Then you can do bigger water changes after that. This dilutes the salt out of the tank slowly so it doesn't harm the fish.

If you do water changes while using salt, you need to treat the new water with salt before adding it to the tank. This will keep the salt level stable in the tank and minimise stress on the fish.

When you first add salt, add the salt to a small bucket of tank water and dissolve the salt. Then slowly pour the salt water into the tank near the filter outlet. Add the salt over a couple of minutes.

 

[Penelope .R]

Just to update, the fish is doing really well. The sore is slowly going away and it is no longer pinkish red.
Everyone is great, thanks for the insight! My silvers are my favorite fish and I've had them longer than any of my others so when there's something wrong I don't like to leave anything up to chance.

 

[StripySnailGirl04]

Just to update, the fish is doing really well. The sore is slowly going away and it is no longer pinkish red.
Everyone is great, thanks for the insight! My silvers are my favorite fish and I've had them longer than any of my others so when there's something wrong I don't like to leave anything up to chance.

That's good to hear!

 

[Rocky998]

Just to update, the fish is doing really well. The sore is slowly going away and it is no longer pinkish red.
Everyone is great, thanks for the insight! My silvers are my favorite fish and I've had them longer than any of my others so when there's something wrong I don't like to leave anything up to chance.

Awesome!