Botia Striata in the loach barrel

[LoachOrgy]

Here is a better video of a few of the botia
striata I picked up two days ago. These guys
are very curious. I gave them bloodworms today
to try and get the skinny one of the bunch to eat.
Here is a video.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=DS3WfPt2ffk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn_IeHXvrlI

Well, he is skinny and there are pictures below
that look like cws. I grabbed the bloodworms with
my hand and put it right in front of him. He then
took one bloodworm from me and tried to eat it.
Took him around 30 minutes but I am happy I did it.
I am currently waiting levimasole hcl in the mail and
will treat them when it arrives.


These are not the greatest pictures but the best
I could get. The loach looks really horrible and
I hope he makes it. When i see him sideways, hes
a toothepick. Fortunately, I saw him eat. I may try to
give him another worm. The sad thing is, he doesn't
have the strength to get food from the other loaches.
He can barely swim around. Poor Guy!

[Emma Turner]

LO, I would get hold of some tiny frozen foods such as baby brineshrimp, daphnia and cyclops for this little B. striata. All of these are very nutritious and regular small feeds should help (along with the Levamisole treatment of course).

Emma

[shari2]

LO, would you pretty please try to get some above and full side pics of your sick little guy? Need examples for the skinny article in the works and have no pics of striatas with symptoms.
Hoping he will hold out till the levamisole arrives. . .

[LoachOrgy]

Guess what Emma, you read my mind. I actually gave them baby brine shrimp last night. I saw speckles of them for quite some time but after about 4 hours they were all gone. I saw this little guy sitting right near where I put them. This morning I saw little baby loach pellets near that area. So I am hoping he ate them. I gave them an algae disc and cucumber slice for breakfast. When I get home today, I am going to do another half cube of the brine shrimp. I think these guys are still getting used to the food. They had them eating algae wafers at the lfs.

Shari, I tried for almost an hour to get good pics but the lighting at that point is very difficult with the angle of the tank. I will try and snap more tonight. You almost can't see this guy sideways.

I also have a video you can use if you want. It is very blurred so I didn't upload it. Ill try and get some new shots and vids for you to use. If anything I can send them via disc if they are too large to send.


Is it necessary to treat the cherry barbs with the levimasole hcl?

Or can I put them in the 55 gallon loach tank?

I will most likely qt them the same amount of time I do the striata. They are all going in the same tank. The female bristlenose catfish is going in the tetra tank.

I lost a neon the other night in my tetra tank. It appeared the guy had dropsy so I did a permanganate bath. I think the little guy was about to go out anyway. Eventually the neon passed away. I don't see any signs of anything in that tank now. But I am most likely going to treat the tank for dropsy tonight.

[shari2]

What are you treating for dropsy with?
Really, the best thing you can do for it by way of prevention/improvement are more frequent water changes. Meds are not always effective.

Is it dropsy you're meaning or perhaps fish TB?

[LoachOrgy]

I have no idea. The neon had a giant bulging belly. I figured it was dropsy.

[shari2]

sounds like. don't think it's contagious, though...

[LoachOrgy]

i recieved my lavimasole and will treat the tank tonight. Is it a good idea to treat the bristlenose pleco and 3 cherry barbs as well?

[shari2]

It shouldn't hurt them. If they are all in the same tank I'd think it would be ok, though I don't generally make it a practice to treat apparently healthy fish, in the case of levamisole, it seems to be relatively safe used responsibly.

[LoachOrgy]

lfs said they would give me store credit if the two fish die. i hope they survive!

[mikev]

Sorry for your loss, LO, and sorry for not being around (having a considerably worse fish problem myself...never mind).

One word of advice: do not quarantine different fishes together...this may backfire very badly....and you don't want to be in a situation where you have to choose which disease to treat.

Now, it so happens that we can compare notes on Striata CWS.

My recent team of referees had two such animals. They were dewormed instantly, in fact before they reached the tank, and all got followup's per my sched. Both are gone now.

One died on day 10 of quarantine...not from the disease, but it was still very weakened and succumbed to EBL instead.

The other faded away about ten days later...it did not die, but rather fattened to the point that I no longer know which one it was...they are getting quite a lot of frozen food, 3, now 2 times a day. While they are small, I did not bother with baby foods, since I saw them all enthusiastically eating normal bloodworms, brine shrimp and flakes.

Today is day 29.

(Emma, if you are reading this, it seems like this batch does not have The Disease...but I'm still watching for it).

LO, here is one thing from the past experience with skinny: even if the fish survives and appears healthy, it can be severely compromised. One example of many: I had a Kub that recovered to the point of normal functioning, but never grew, was stuck at 1". A compromised fish whether it grows or not appears to be considerably more vulnerable to stress factors....so sadly it may not be the best idea to try to cure them when the disease reaches a certain point. But if you do get another one like this, acclimate it very slowly, treat it right away, and don't move it to another tank: this is stress, potentially lethal.

[LoachOrgy]

Mikev,

thanks for your input. Well, the skinny loach died yesterday. Poor guy. I didn't even get to treat him. But the rest of the bunch looks healthy as ever. They are eating brine shirimp, bloodworms, mesquito larvae, a little cucumber, and they really don't like the algae wafers. I think they were fed algae wafers the entire year this lfs had them in their little dungeon. I put some rocks in the tank and they love them to death. The blend in well with the rocks and now I am catching them playing around the rocks.

The lfs said they will give me store credit which is fine. I need some fish food anyway.


I knew this loach had skinny before I bought him but I felt that If I took him away from his friends he would have more chance of dying that way. I think at that point he was already too far gone in which there was nothing more I could do.


The pleco, had yellow on one of his fins when I got him. I thought this was coloration but I guess it wasn't. Poor guy.


I will pay much more attention next time.

[mikev]

I knew this loach had skinny before I bought him but I felt that If I took him away from his friends he would have more chance of dying that way. I think at that point he was already too far gone in which there was nothing more I could do.

I would have done the same. But if this happens again, do keep in mine that this type of fish has the deck stacked against it and you'd need to deal with it extremely carefully until you have evidence of both fattening and growth.

I think Pleco was a mistake. The only time getting another fish into the same quarantine tank is safe is if it came from the same store tank. Otherwise even if the pleco was healthy, you would still be exposing a weak loach to the bugs in another store tank, and even mild bugs are deadly to an animal with weakened immune system.

Yellow/Orange/Reddish on the pleco fins may be normal (if fully symmetric) or indicate some deadly disease. I originally got two commons , in the dark ages when I believed the lfs that a common pleco is a small fish that fits even a 10g), one had such markings and lasted only a couple of days. Probably this infection was what killed the Striata, or it could have been your nitrites, they are deadly if an animal is already weakened by something else.

I made this mistake before...

[LoachOrgy]

yeah i had those nitrate readings one day. i immediately changed the water and added prime. the readings were normal yesterday when the loach died. poor guy. i just fed him some small shrimp and he died right after eating. at least he had a last meal.

well went to the lfs and traded for another small pleco and some tetras. this is all they had. the pleco is a rubber pleco. i know this guy is going to get big but it is all they had to replace this one and I wanted to take advantage of the trade as I could because they had a no return policy.
crappy store! they don't take care of the fish well. i saw tons of dead ones today.


these guys i picked up all look very healthy.

[mikev]

Good luck with your new fish...I hope you are not putting them in the Striata tank.

Nitrites (not nitrates) can be very deadly to small and/or weak fish even in tiny amounts.

One possibility of what happened to my CWS Striata, incidentally, was that the other Striata's managed to sabotage the HOB in the tank overnight. So in the morning I had a non-running filter, nitrites at 0.25, and a dead weakest loach.