HELP Clown Loaches not eating

[Summer888]

We are complete beginners with fish and we simply saw 2 clown loaches in the store and bought them along with other fishes for our new 60 gallon tank. They are about 1 and half-2 inches. The first week they were swimming happily up and down, across the tank and now they don't move that much anymore. They use to swim together and now they swim separately. They haven't eaten anything for the past week and we are very worried. Every other fish is doing fine. At first we thought maybe it was because the bigger fish was taking the food but when we blocked them off with a net, the loaches were sitting right by the food and not even trying to eat it. No one was in there way. We tried freeze dried bloodworms, frozen/thawed bloodworms, and shrimp pellets. Nothing has been working and they look very skinny. We called the pet store but they said they couldn't do anything and the best thing we could try was water changes. What should we do?

[Diana]

They are little babies. I would put them in their own smaller tank (perhaps 10 gallons) to treat them and help them grow.
Many bottom feeding fish (Loaches, Catfish, others) can get intestinal parasites very easily. In such small fish as yours the parasites can kill them very quickly.

When I got Loaches that small I treated them for internal parasites and boosted their immune system with Levamisole.

http://www.loaches.com/Members/shari2/l ... chloride-1

You can try tempting them to eat by flavoring their food with garlic.
Crush a small amount of garlic and blend it with the food (does not matter if the food is dry or wet) and let it sit for a few minutes to half an hour. Then feed the food and the garlic bits. I have had some fish go for the garlic, and skip the frozen bloodworms!

[redshark1]

Hi, I hope that I can help you.

You say you are complete beginners so I shall address your problem with that in mind.

You have not given much detail of water parameters such as ammonia/nitrate/temperature/ph/o2/stocking levels/filtration etc., but I will assume that is because you don't have them yet or don't realise their importance.

You also say that this is a new tank. This makes me think that ammonia might be the problem. I'll address this below.

You say that your other fish appear fine. It could of course be that they are less sensitive to the problem. Clown Loach are a sensitive species when young and newly introduced. After acclimatisation they are relatively robust, but it is getting them through the initial stages that is critical. They often suffer from whitespot when first introduced. Have yours got whitespot?

If you are like the majority of people you may have failed to do much research before purchasing your aquarium and fish. That's OK, not ideal but not unusual.

You may have been relying on the staff at the shop for guidance. Unfortunately, shops will not pass up a sale and generally act in their interests and not yours.

You have chosen a good size for a first aquarium.

The most important thing to be aware of when setting up a beginner aquarium is that fish live in their own waste and that this is toxic. Basically the fish excrete ammonia into the water and this will kill them unless it is dealt with.

It is dealt with through a process known as cycling in the aquarium. There is now a tremendous amount of helpful information about cycling on the internet so you can soon become familiar with the process but I outline it below.

Cycling refers to the nitrogen cycle. The highly toxic ammonia produced by the fish is converted into nitrate which is of low toxicity. However, this is only achieved when the tank is fully cycled.

A fully cycled tank has a filter which is well populated by the bacteria which convert ammonia into nitrate. These are called denitifying bacteria. This takes time (several weeks or months) and is achieved by gradually building up the bacteria population by feeding them with a gently increasing load of ammonia.

The bacteria are present everywhere in the environment and will colonise the aquarium surfaces and filter naturally. However, the process can be speeded up by adding contents from an established (mature) filter or by adding purchased bacteria from a bottle.

The filter provides an ideal home for the bacteria so that there are many times more bacteria in the filter than in the aquarium generally.

Ammonia can be introduced gently in several ways. By using pure ammonia, by adding a source of food such as a few fish flakes or by adding live fish slowly starting with one or two at a time over many weeks or months.

Whichever method is chosen it needs to be backed up by water testing so that you can monitor the levels of ammonia and nitrate. Water testing has to confirm that all the ammonia is being converted into nitrate and the tank is fully cycled.

Nitrate becomes toxic at higher levels so it is removed by doing water changes e.g. 25% each week is an often quoted figure.

If you have not enabled this process there is a danger that ammonia is present in the water. This would affect the fish and may cause the loss of appetite that you have described.

If you think that may be the case the best course of action is to remove the fish to a safe environment and undertake the cycling process before re-introducing them.

In your situation you could remove the sensitive species and start the cycling process with the hardiest fish.

I realise it is not easy but I hope you are able to resolve the problem and wish you well.

[Summer888]

They have no white spots. We have a penguin bio wheel 350 power filter for 75 gallon tanks and a seperate smaller filter that hangs in the corner. We have a heater and a temperature monitor that normally reads 80 degrees farenheit. We put aquarium salt into the water according to the box and that's all we do with the water. Do we need to buy a seperate tank/filter/etc for the loaches? Is that the only thing we can do now to start the cycling? Here is a picture:

file:///var/folders/xz/379c34yn5bz2q6fh3x_dhj2m0000gn/T/com.apple.iChat/Messages/Transfers/IMG_6293.JPG

[redshark1]

Hi again and sorry I didn't manage to get back to this thread until now. I hope I sound friendly in my post, I really am, and the information will become easier to digest if you can read it over a few times.

I'm glad there are no white spots. If present these would appear like grains of salt on the fishes skin and fins.

80F is the ideal temperature for Clown Loaches so well done there.

I do not understand the addition of salt to the aquarium. Salt is not added to freshwater fish where I come from. But since you are adding it we can leave that alone for now. I think long-term you should phase out the use of salt but it's probably more important to keep things steady at the moment.

I could not see your picture but your description is adequate. Just to explain for future use: to put a picture into a post I upload a small (300kb or 800 x 600) to a picture hosting service such as photobucket and cut and paste the img link into the post. But don't waste time on that now there are more important things to do.

You read what I said in my post about cycling (well done!) and you think I might be right. OK, then you will now understand that your fishes are in danger and must be moved to a safe place as soon as possible. In my experience fish only appear unwell when they are close to dying so this is unfortunately a desperate situation. Immediate action is required!

A safe place is not another new and uncycled aquarium as I am sure you will now appreciate, right? A safe place is a different but mature cycled aquarium. This may be owned by anyone including the shop you purchased them from.

Fish that are taken out of this situation and put into a safe place should recover although there is a chance that they have been damaged. Ammonia burns the gills and probably affects other vital organs. But lets assume the former as it's more optimistic.

I would only have a few small fish or a sturdy big one in the tank while it is cycling (assuming that you are going to cycle with fish in the tank rather than doing a fishless cycle).

This is to reduce the amount of ammonia being produced.

What I personally would do in your situation is take all fish but the ones you are planning to cycle with back to the shop.

There is a genuine danger that an excess of ammonia (e.g. from too many fish) could actually prevent the aquarium from cycling. This is because at a certain higher level ammonia is actually toxic to the very bacteria that feed on it and convert it to nitrate (the bacteria actually convert toxic ammonia to toxic nitrite and then to less toxic nitrate but we can miss out the middle step for simplicity).

I recommend the purchase of good ammonia and nitrate test kits (API brand is often recommended). They are not very expensive, are quite simple to use and last a long time. Just follow the instructions. Use the liquid test kits and not the paper ones as they are more reliable.

Unfortunately you have some tough things to do to sort this situation out. Sorry I can't make it easier but once you have a cycled tank you will find things much easier, especially if you are willing to continue learning. It's a shame the toughest part comes at the start when all you want to do is sit and watch your new fish!

Luckily for you there is lots of information available online and things are now much better understood than when I started. I am a biologist so I had a good understanding of animals and how they work and that's what I had to rely on.