New member with loach health issue

[water patters]

Hello everyone,

We've run across this board while looking for online resources discussing loaches and Botias and have found the information here indispensable. we were wondering if we could run an issue by the board that is effecting one of our clown loaches and see if anyone could give us some input.

We've had an otherwise healthy tank for around four years, with only minor issues that have been addressed pretty easily as they've come up. Around two weeks ago, we noticed that one of our clowns appeared to be suffering from skinny disease, and we started on a course of eurythomycin (Myracin). After a routine 20% water change, we saw a change in the water by the next day. The water appeared cloudy, and the fish appeared visibly distressed. We took a sample of the water in for testing at our favorite local aquarium store, and the nitrate level was pretty high (we don't have a number value from the test in ppm from that test). We started using amquel that same evening, and doing daily approximately 15% water changes. We continued to test the water with dip testing sticks, and we got a better set of reagent-based testing kits. As of today, the rundown of our tested water is:

PH - 7.6 (possibly slightly higer)
Nitrate - 7ppm
Carbonate hardness - 143.2 ppm
General hardness - 268.5 ppm - The water has always been pretty hard, but we've only very recently had this issue with the tank.

We have a 46 gallon tank with 4 clowns, 8 small botias, one pleco, four red-eyed tetras, two panda barbs and three black skirt tetras.

With that said, the water seems to be getting squared away, at least as far as the nitrate level goes. We are very concerned for our largest clown though; after being stressed with the others by the nitrate spike early last week, he had developed black spots around the size of a pencil eraser on his sides, that had blended edges and touched each other. He stopped eating, and seemed to have very labored breathing. The spots (seem) to be starting to fade, but he is still not eating and is inactive, and his breathing is still very labored. One of his gills isn't opening and closing at all, and his other gill seems to be doing all of the work.

We're working to get a better picture of him to post. We're also continuing on our Erythomycin treatment of the tank for our other skinny clown. For the time being while doing the antibiotic treatment we've removed the carbon filter and are still doing daily 15% water changes.

Thanks in advance for any advice you guys can offer.

Cody and Kelly

[starsplitter7]

Hello, and welcome.

The experts will come along shortly, but while you are waiting, drop the level of water in your tank a little so the water splashes, which will add oxygen. This will help your clown with the breathing issues.

What are the other botias? What type of Pleco?

What are your Ammonia and Nitrite readings?

I have used AMquel and it says to increase oxygen during treatment when the tank is overstocked, and it does sound like your tank is a bit overstocked (I could be wrong). But to be safe, drop your water level. Also consider using Prime. It is cheaper and does everything that Amquel does and a bit more. You use 1 mL per 10 gallons.

Good luck with your fish. Tanja.

[Blue]

Any pics of the skinny loach? Is the skull clearly obvious? Your situation is similar to this one.
http://forums.loaches.com/viewtopic.php?t=13790

[shari2]

For possible help with your blackspot issue see here:
http://forums.loaches.com/viewtopic.php ... s&start=45

very long thread, but LOTS of good information.

What size are your clowns? I would venture to say that your nitrate problem may be related to overstocking...that's a lot of fish for a 46g tank.

What temp do you keep the tank at? Higher temps hold less oxygen. Try lowering your water level as well as the bubble wand. You need to get oxygen into the tank, especially if your clown's gill function is compromised.

eurythomycin will kill off your biological filter. I'd second the Prime recommendation and keep a close eye on the tank for nitrite or ammonia spikes. It's usually better to treat with antibiotics in a qtank unless all your fish are affected because they frequently (especially gram negative ones) will damage the biofilter. They affect bacteria indiscriminately, which means that the beneficial bacteria are susceptible, too.

[water patters]

Thanks for the replies, folks. We appreciate it.

To answer a few question that have been raised:

We don't have a reagent-based test for ammonia, but we have an ammonia detector disk that mounts inside of the tank. That is not indicating any significant ammonia levels, and the color shows in the safe range on the disk's guide. We showed in the safe range on the test dip sticks for nitrites, so we didn't do the reagent test for those. We're planning on doing so for a baseline reading since it would be good to have a numeric value.

We have 2 yoyo botias, 2 zodiac loaches, one female striped sand loach, one botia histronica, and one botia kubotai. We're pretty certain on their identification, but we aren't 100% sure. Our identification has been based upon the pictures in this site's species index. We think our pleco is a spotted pleco (hypostomus punctatus).

We can see a bone line along the sides of the skinny loach; his skull isn't clearly visible like some of the pictures we've seen here. We're not sure if the antibiotics are helping but he is not getting any skinnier and he has a healthy appetite.

We actually lowered the water level a few days ago on recommendation of posts we saw here when we noticed the fish working harder to breathe. That had an overnight benefit for them, and only our large clown was still breathing hard.

We are going to set up a secondary tank to put our sick clown and our skinny clown into, so we can restore the main tank's biowheel back to health. The prime would help to restock the water with beneficial bacteria, right?

Cody and Kelly

[starsplitter7]

Seachem Prime is used to treat the water going into the tank like AmQuell.

According to the bottle it removes Chlorine, Chloramine, Ammonia and detoxifies Nitrite and Nitrate and provides Slime Coat. The big benefit is that you use less.

The ammonia is still available for the bio filter, when you get it going again.

It removes .6 mg/L ammonia, 3 mg/L chloramine 4 mg/L chlorine.

I use Cycle to add bacteria, but I am not 100% sure it works. I always try to keep spare filters running on other tanks, so if I use antibiotics, I have another filter to use if needed.

[chefkeith]

Hello everyone,
Cody and Kelly

Hello , I'm not sure if I can help, but I have a few questions.

How long have you had the clown loaches?

What brand of Nitrate test kit did you get? I've rarely seen one that was accurate enough to get a 7 ppm reading. I'd like to get one myself.

So you normally do a 20% water change? If so how often?

You mentioned a biowheel, is this the only filter you use?

[water patters]

Hello Chefkeith,

The clowns are between three and four years in age. The nitrate test kit is a API (Aquarium Pharmaceuticals) kit, and we just followed the instructions in the kit. The nitrate test seems to be very timing sensitive, since there are two reagents involved and you have a fixed minimum time to wait before you measure your results.

No, we would normally do a 20% water change around every three weeks. Since the start of the troubles with the tank, we have been doing about a 10 to 15% water change on a daily basis.

We normally use a carbon filter in our Penguin filter in addition to the biowheel, but we've temporarily removed that during our antibiotic treatment. We've replaced the carbon filter today following a 10% water change.

We've setup a hospital tank and are currently waiting for a while after treating it with prime and cycle before we transfer our ailing fish. In your opinions, how long should we wait before using the hospital tank?

Taking into consideration that we may have sterilized our biowheel with the antibiotic treatment of the tank, should we get our biota back in order by using both prime and cycle, or will cycle itself be sufficient?

[shari2]

Definitely keep up the water changes during treatment and I'd recommend doing your 20% wc's at least weekly in future. You may want to consider getting an additional filter, as well. Always good to have extra filtration, and in the case of one failing, the other may keep disaster at bay...

To help jump start the qtank you could use some of the substrate or plants (if you have them) in the new tank. Your biofilter may not be completely gone, but if you saw cloudy water, it probably took a hit. Cloudy water is often caused by what is called a 'bacterial bloom' - the tank bacteria multiplying rapidly.

When I set up a qtank I use a sponge from one of my filters or off of the intake tube. (I keep an aquaclear sponge over the intakes of my tanks - it filters out larger debris and provides extra space for bacterial filtration)
Fill the tank, pop on a filter loaded with the extra sponge and I'm good to go. Make sure you provide some kind of hiding place for the clowns to reduce stress. They will be stressed in a bare tank with no place to hide. Either a pvc tube or a rock leaning against a wall - something they think hides them but you can see into. You'll want to observe them during treatment.

Prime doesn't provide bacteria, and I'm not sure how effective Cycle actually is. Your best bet would be to get some bacteria from your current tank to jump start the other one. Don't let it run empty. The bacteria need fish waste for food.

[chefkeith]

I agree with Shari about the health problems being related to the stocking and tank size issue.

It's sounds like the tank had OTS. Old Tank Syndrome.

I computed what the water parameters would like with 20% water changes every 3 weeks and the nitrates would easily get to over 100 ppm after about 1 year.

The Nitrates were quite high and not healthy for the fish.

Here's the program I used to estimate the nitrates-
http://www.geocities.com/chefkeithallen ... izard.html

To keep the water quality in check a 25% weekly water change is required if 1 ppm of Nitrates is produced each day.

[Diana]

Bio Spira is one of the only sources of the actual nitrifying bacteria. The bacteria and other things in Cycle may be of some benefit, or may be useless. If you can find Bio Spira I would add that to the large tank, but do not bother adding it to the hospital tank. It is likely that whatever treatment you do in there will kill the bacteria. Keep up the water changes in the hospital tank to keep removing the ammonia.

A cycled tank will show 0 ppm ammonia and 0 ppm nitrite. Any other reading suggests that something is going on with the nitrifying bacteria. If your dip stick test and stick on test are showing 0 and no hint of any other color, then your tank is probably fine. If there is any hint that the color is not 0 then do the API tests.

In general the optimum way to schedule water changes is by monitoring the nitrate level, and do enough water changes both size and frequency to keep the nitrate under 20 ppm. Often this means a weekly water change of between 25% and 50%. It can mean more frequent water changes, depending on your stocking levels and feeding habits.
If the source for new water (tap or other) is significantly different than the tank (harder or softer, different pH) then your fish will be better with smaller, more frequent water changes, the 10-15% daily may be best.
If you can do all the tests you have and post the results we can suggest some more ideas about maintaining tank water quality.
Test tap water with all the tests, then repeat the pH test on some water that has been sitting out for 24-48 hours.
Test the tank with all the tests.
Ammonia, Nitrite, Nitrate, pH, GH, KH and any other test(s) you have.

[water patters]

Thanks for everyone's input.

We'll test the main tank water tonight after a water change, and set aside some tap water to test as well, and get those results posted.

Our skinny clown appears to be on the mend, or at least isn't doing any worse and certainly has a healthy appetite. We've given them some bloodworms for the last two evenings, in an attempt to get our large sick clown to eat, but to no avail. At this point, he hasn't eaten in around a week and we're really concerned.

Kelly and Cody

[water patters]

Hey everyone, it's been a couple of days and we thought we'd post an update on our situation. We've tested the water as of last night, and here were our results:

Nitrate : 5ppm
Nitrite : 0 (nothing measurable, anyway)
PH : 7.6 or slightly higer
Carbonate hardness : 143.2 ppm
General hardness : 232.7 ppm

We've established a hospital tank, and planning on transferring our sick pair of clowns to the tank. We wanted to ask the forum about a compound we've been recommended by an aquarium shop owner, called Naladin. The chemical compound is called Naladixic acid, and the indications are for remediation of abdominal swelling, wasting, gasping / red gills, bacterial infections, etc. It's only supposed to be used once, and a single dose is supposed to be effective. If not, you are not supposed to continue to use it. We did some research on this forum, and didn't find any information on this compound or its use. Have any of you heard about this?

We're attaching a few pictures of our larger clown that isn't eating, and our smaller skinny clown. You can see the black marks on our larger clown in a few of the pictures.