white spot??

[New Boy]

I noticed last night that one of my Blood Parrots has 10 or so white spots on her tail and fins (can't see any on her body) and that the fish seem to be scratching themselves a little on rocks etc but I'm not sure if this is white spot. She also looks a little pale.

No other fish appear to have any spots, the female BP is eating normally etc. I don't want to treat the whole tank if it's not white spot (which I've never had before so that's why I'm not sure).

The tank has only juvenille fish in it - 5 lions cove labs, 5 tiger barbs, 4 small blood parrots, 2 bristlenose cats and 2 raphael cats. 1,600 litres filtration per hour, 190 litre (50 us gallon tank, 43 imp gallon).

Water conditions are fine - ammonia nil, nitrite nil, nitrate 35ppm, ph 7.8, temp 76/78, hardness 15, all per usual. I change 15% water weekly.

Added the two bristlenose cats two weeks ago.

I should also mention that since I got the tank one year ago I always used to add one teaspoon of aquarium salt per 2 gallons of water that I added during water changes. I stopped this just under two months ago after reading so many posts on this forum and others that salt was not of much use and plecos in particular (which I wanted to add to reduce algae) did not appreciate it.

Thought I was planning ahead by letting the salt be diluted through water changes to add plecos but it seems coincedental that when I stop adding salt I get ich. Maybe I should start adding it again?

Did put this in emergencies first but haven’t got any replies so wondered if I could get advice from the chit chat forum??
I'd be grateful for any advice
Thanks

 

[smb]

Sounds like it could be ich.

It will usually first be seen on the fins and tail then a couple days later will start to show up on the body.

I would buy whatever commercially available ich medicine is available to you and apply it for 2 weeks. Take any carbon you have out and raising the temp to 82F might help.

 

[AquaNut]

I KNOW I'm going to get jumped all over for this, but I just *have* to respond. I have found some extraordinarily helpful people on this forum and have learned tons in the few weeks I've been coming here. I also feel pretty good about having helped give advice to some less experienced hobbyists along the way. However, I've also noticed that there seems to be a bit of a cult mentality amongst some members ---> There is only one right way to keep fish and it's OUR way. I sometimes wonder, when reading some rather adamant advice, whether the person giving it has actually experienced any of what they're saying, or if it was read in a really good book/website etc. I figure that anyone who's here looking for information is clearly literate and can read all the same expert opinions as I have read.

That said...

I use salt in all my tanks. I have a four year old pleco who's as happy as happy can be and four of my cories are also four years old. I recently added two new baby cories to my group, and they're also doing wonderfully. There used to be an elderly lady in my town who had run an lfs all her life... and her mother ran an lfs here for many years before that. When all the expert and modern advice I had read failed me, she always had some good old fashioned solution that worked miracles. When I started keeping fish, I had one problem after another. Ich, fungus, and dropsy kept re-appearing in my tank. In turn, I'd medicate. I was forever playing around with different bottles of chemicals and bags of carbon. Not surprisingly, things weren't improving. (it's really tough to stabilize a fairly new tank when you're constantly medicating/removing medication). One day, she said, "Do you have salt in your tanks, hun?" I said, "No! They're freshwater fish. They're not supposed to have salt." She just smiled at me and told me to put some salt in my tanks. I asked her about having fish that were intolerant to it. She said that a tsp of salt in a gallon of water is negligible to the fish (I'm only talking fw tropical fish here); it's what it does to everything else that matters. Fungus, ich, and who knows what else don't survive in the salted water. I didn't *believe* her, but I did trust her. So I went home and started adding salt. I keep about a tsp of water/gallon, but I occasionally do a water change without adding salt. I cannot refute what the experts say about scaleless fish in salted water, except by showing pictures of my fish. I haven't medicated a tank in years. I don't use carbon, I don't use chemicals, and I don't lose fish (well of course I lose one once in a while).

I suggest you go back to adding salt.

 

[AquaNut]

Oh! I almost forgot. Do follow smb's advice. It sounds like you're beyond salt on this round.

 

[Alien Anna]

Aquanut,
the reason why salt isn't good for certain fish is to do with how their kidneys control homeostasis (ie. the amount of water in their tissues and blood). Living in salt, for a salt intolerant species, necessarily puts more strain on the kidneys and makes it more difficult for that fish's kidneys to remove natural toxins (such as those produced naturally in the fish's body when he breaks down protein) from the blood.

Salt affects certain fish, particularly fish without scales, more because their skin is more porous.

Other species of fish such as marine fish actually have mechanisms in their body to maintain a salt concentration exactly the same as the surrounding water. Their bodies' draw in water a precisely the correct quantity to remove the toxins from the blood, without diluting the blood. Brackish fish like mollies can do the same, but they can also switch this mechanism off if the surrounding salinity changes.

It is rather like a human eating junk food and smoking - he might be perfectly healthy now, but the chances are lower that he'll live to a ripe old age.

Now, you may choose to do whatever you like with that information, but I hope you'll see that it's not "cult mentality" that causes people to recommend avoiding salt with certain fish, but science. It is always good to question why "Things have always been done this way" because you may well uncover a logical inconsistency - take the ubiquitous use of carbon, for instance, which has not been proved to be the slightest bit helpful in normal circumstances, but please don't accuse people of being cultish as a first resort!

As for ich, there is no need to use salt as there are many proprietary remedies available that will more than adquately treat the condition.

 

[AquaNut]

Alien Anna -

... and you accuse me of making assumptions. lol

Perhaps I didn't express myself clearly enough. I knew about the scientific reasoning behind not using salt in freshwater tanks before I started using it. As I said, I asked my fish friend how I could use salt for salt intolerant fish. Again, as I said, her response was that 1 teaspoon of salt in a gallon of water was a negligible amount for any of the basic tropical fw fish I kept. She knew I had a pleco and cories. I doubted what she said because I had READ many times that salt was unnecessary. However, I looked around her shop. I saw the healthiest tanks I'd ever seen in an lfs. Anywhere. I decided that all the received knowledge in the world could not compare with experience. She was and still is the most experienced fish keeper I have ever known. I decided to trust her. If you feel 'proprietary remedies' are more natural and better for your fish than salt, that's great. I firmly believe every fish keeper should do what works best for him or her, provided that the fish are healthy and their needs seem to be met. You feel more comfortable trusting what you've read, and I feel more comfortable trusting what I've experienced. I personally think adding chemical medications to fish tanks is unnatural and tends to be disruptive to water quality, nitrifying bacteria, fish, and plantlife. Since beginning the use of salt, I've NOT NEEDED any proprietary remedies. My fish do not get sick. I lost a white skirt tetra last week. She was four years old. I've heard they can live to be five, but I think a lot of people lose tetras at less than four years old. I have other tetras that age, too.

As for the cult mentality comment, it applied to far more than the topic of salt or non-salt. I made no assumptions. It was, rather, an observation I've been making since coming here several weeks ago. It's a natural sociological phenomenon. It's just more exaggerated and easier to see in an online forum.

Anyway, no hard feelings were meant. I don't come here to troll around and make enemies. I come here because I find the many different ways people can be successful in keeping fish to be fascinating, I enjoy hearing other peoples' innovative ways of dealing with different situations, and I enjoy a lot of the people and the personalities that show through in their posts.

 

[cory]

I've always used trace amounts of salt in my aquariums. My 100 gallon tank has been functioning beautifully for over seven years. I have corys that are far older than my tank, that have tolerated, no...thrived under these conditions.

I too started with aquarium salt, for my FW fish, after being told to use trace amounts in my tanks, by a local, self-described "fish witch," who'd raised and sold fish for over sixty years.

Now, I'm not disputing that there is a certain level of salt that becomes bad for certain FW fish, I just don't believe that these fish are harmed by trace amounts of salt. I'm not talking sea water or even slightly brackish conditions, just the amount of salt that might naturally desolve into fresh water from the Earth.

I'd also like to add that I'm new here, and haven't experienced any cultish, clique-like behavior from the senior members of this forum. As a matter of fact, before I'd made post one, I PM'd a couple of memebers for advice, or to get a little elaboration on posts of their's that I'd read, and was treated with complete and total hospitality.

 

[AquaNut]

I'd also like to add that I'm new here, and haven't experienced any cultish, clique-like behavior from the senior members of this forum. As a matter of fact, before I'd made post one, I PM'd a couple of memebers for advice, or to get a little elaboration on posts of their's that I'd read, and was treated with complete and total hospitality.

I feel I must apologise for the cult mentality comment. It seems to be misunderstood and, in retrospect, wasn't a very pleasant observation for me to voice. In no way did I mean to suggest that anybody here is unfriendly or inhospitable. Quite the opposite is true; it is one of the friendliest online communities I've found.

Not that this has any bearing on why I used the word, but if you think about it, cults are the friendliest groups around - always welcoming any prospective new member with the most widely opened arms. Furthermore, cultmembers generally do not recruit new members for selfish reasons. Rather, they truly believe that they have found some sort of absolute truth and wish to share it with all.

This last part relates to my choice of words. Some (NOT all, or even a majority) of the people on this board (and every other message board.. no, correction, in every social forum, on or offline) seem to repeat their received knowledge like a mantra. Over and over, I see people advising new hobbyists that any salt in the water will cause severe burns to cories and plecos. I'm certain they are trying to be very helpful. However, I'm also sure that not all of these people have actually experienced this (ie. they haven't actually burned a cory or pleco by putting them in salt water). I think they probably read it somewhere they considered to be reliable. Maybe it was in a book, or maybe it was the opinion of somebody they highly respect on this board. Because they trust their source, they consider it to be an absolute truth and defend it with vigour, even if they have no real experience with it. Most importantly, they refuse to accept anything else as being possible.

I do not doubt that sea water or brackish water could burn a cory or pleco. However, I know with absolute certainty that small amounts of salt (plenty to keep ich, fungus, and other parasites permanently at bay, however!) do not burn them.

Of course, there is no way to definitively prove whether or not living in slightly salted water has shortened your fish's life due to kidney problems, as Alien Anna has said. I only know that I very rarely lose a fish at what I would consider to be an unreasonably premature time. Before the use of salt, I was regularly losing fish very prematurely. Looking back, I now know that a good deal of my trouble came from the fact that I purchased a second-hand tank, extremely over-stocked with completely incompatible fish. That's not really important, though. The point is that salt did the trick under those horrible conditions in the early days and has continued to work for me all this time. As aquarists, we keep fish and aquaria for our own pleasure. I very much enjoy the balances I've achieved through the way I maintain my tanks. I enjoy not using chemicals or messing around with all sorts of different filter media. If, after living long and seemingly happy lives, my cories or pleco ultimately die slightly younger than they could have been if I'd avoided even the small amounts of salt I use, I don't think I'll be bothered by it.

I hope this helps to clarify my intended meaning, and I again apologise to anybody I may have offended. It certainly wasn't my most diplomatic moment in history. My three year old daughter was serenading me with a tambourine at the time. I think I'll blame that!

 

[focus]

yeah thats it blame a 3 year old

 

[Alien Anna]

yeah thats it blame a 3 year old

Can't really blame the cat if you don't have one. Could blame the fish.

 

[AquaNut]

I do have two cats, but they are of similar mind as I when it comes to tambourine serenades. They're equally displeased by bongo drums, the xylophone, maracas, and the ever-blessed recorder. However, I meant to place blame on the tambourine recital specifically, not just my daughter in general.

 

[cory]

I believe that it is ok to use atleast one teaspoon of salt per five gallons of water.



I believe that it is ok to use atleast one teaspoon of salt per five gallons of water.



I believe that it is ok to use atleast one teaspoon of salt per five gallons of water.




I believe that it is ok to use atleast one teaspoon of salt per five gallons of water.




Ohme..Ohme...Ohme....Ohme.....