Loaches Online Forum

On this fine morning, I'm here to report that things are going seemingly well. The activated carbon worked rather miraculously over night. The water is clear and the mucus layer on the surface has disappeared. The blotches on Gracie, are fading away faster than I can believe. The rest of clown loach...

Thanks for support. A few hours ago, I finally realized that activated carbon might help. So I went back to the LFS and bought 2 cartons of the API Activated Carbon. Got home, loaded up 5 canisters, and it seems to be doing it's job. I'll know more in a few hours. The sudsy bubbles and mucus on the ...

Other notes: I never saw loaches so happy for a water change before. They waited right underneath the outlet hose where I was pumping in fresh water. The loaches in the main tanks seem happy right now. I dialed down the tank temps to 82F also, so they are happy about that too. The clowns in the quar...

I just finished the water changes and getting everything running again. I did the water changes with 5 gallon buckets and about 50 buckets worth. I filled, dechlorinated, salted, checked TDS, checked Temp, then pumped in, then repeat. The tanks are still a mess with slime coat everywhere. It looked ...

It got really bad. Almost all the clowns shed their slime coat. The slime coats then floated to the surface and became sudsy. Then all the Boesmani got tangled up in the slime and got asphyxiated, so I moved them all to one of the planted tanks. 2 died so far. The loaches are in really rough shape. ...

This is not good. Some of the clowns have shed their slime coat. I'm doing a massive water change to get this under control.

I treated the loach tanks with quinine. Dosage I used is 1 gram per 25 gallons. I dissolved about 10.5 grams in a bucket of warm water. Added it to the tanks and now the loaches are really freaking out. I hope I didn't use too much. I don't know what to do. I'll just wait it out I guess. This is tur...

Before starting the Quinine treatment I decided to some tank maintenance. So I removed some of the driftwood and large PVC pipe caves, so that I could do some substrate vac'ing. As I did, I noticed a few more clowns with frayed dorsal fins. That really opened my eyes that there are some underlying i...

Good idea. I'll move the fish from the planted tanks later. There are dozens of bristlenose fry and a few boesmani juvi's in them. Also hundreds of MTS snails that I didn't think about earlier. I'll set-up a snail trap for them later. I'll just deal them all separately and set-up a few more quaranti...

I also think I may remove my planted tanks from the tank system and treat them separately.

Thanks. If it's not good for invertebrates, then I'll need to remove the snails and shrimp before the treatment then. Which is not a problem.

A few questions:
Is quinine sulfate safe for plants and biological filters?
Also, can it be used with a UV Sterilizer?

I got the quinine sulfate. My LFS owner was kind enough to sell me some from his private stock. I should have enough to treat 800 gallons or my main tanks twice. I didn't get very far in with the salt treatment, just enough to drip raise the salinity by 250 ppm in 14 hours. So I quit the salt treatm...

Have you considered quinine or other anti-malarial drugs for ich? They're easier on fish than the traditional treatments and I believe they do work on the life stages actively feeding on the fish. In other words, it's not limited to the free-swimming forms. Thanks for the suggestion. I haven't used...

Bad news. Ich 100% confirmed. I didn't want to believe it til I've seen it, but i've clearly seen a few ich spots. I'll start the ich salt treatment immediately. I can't believe my bad luck. I just hope I've caught it on time before there are massive loses.