My alpha clown loach needs your medical knowledge
Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 9:32 pm
Hello *@*,
my alpha clown loach is sick for several months now and quite frankly, I have no clue what else I could try anymore. Perhaps someone of you has a bright idea what to do now.
I will try to be as detailed as possible. Sorry for the large pictures but I want to give you the best information I can.
What I observed:
The white spots appeared over night about 3 months ago. Back then my ancistrus pair was breeding in one of the tubes the clowns usually slept in. The male ancistrus guarding the eggs was making sure everyone who tried to snatch one of the eggs was going to pay for it, so a lot of loaches were dinged and scratched at this time, but they usually healed up pretty quickly (days).
So when I saw my alpha clown like this for the first time, I wasn't worried because it looked like patterns of the ancistrus gill spikes, which are approximately spaced like the white dots on the body of the loach. Unfortunately they didn't heal or change since then. They are basically the same today. From what I can tell there aren't any new ones and the old ones don't go away or change either.
This is not ich or velvet. None of the other fish in my tank are affected, so I think I can categorically rule out anything contagious (3 months!).
- As you can see from the pictures the fins are quite torn apart and there's also some mould on them and on the gill plate.
- The lateral line organ is looking quite visibly pronounced (white).
- The eyes have a palish ring not present in the other loaches.
- Body colour is alot paler compared to the other (healthy) clowns.
These symptoms appeared shortly after the initial showing of the white spots.
The white spots themselves are clearly raised from the skin, like a pustule. Most of them are on the back third of the body, some on the middle third and none in the front third.
Behavior:
My alpha eats normally but obviously doesn't feel well. She's clamping her fins a lot of the time and when other loaches approach she submissively tilts to the side. She also isn't trying to enforce her alpha status anymore (most of the time). There's also more than usual scratching to be seen.
What I tried:
- I netted her out 2 times to give her a 6 hour bath in eSHa "Exit" and eSHa "2000", medicaments used to battle ich, velvet, skin lesions, mould and the like
- The bath immediately got rid of the mould and secondary infections but had no effect whatsoever on the white spots
- Unfortunately all the secondary problems came back just days after putting her back into the community tank
- I added 0.5 TSP of salt per gallon to the tank for a week. No effect.
Frankly, I didn't know what to do anymore and just watched for the last 2-3 weeks, hoping the fish would overcome this problem by itself. I was doing very large weekly waterchanges, too.
It doesn't look to me like she will manage to heal this -whatever it is- by herself, though. Any ideas of what else I could try would be greatly appreciated by me and my alpha clown!
Thanks for reading this,
Connor
my alpha clown loach is sick for several months now and quite frankly, I have no clue what else I could try anymore. Perhaps someone of you has a bright idea what to do now.
I will try to be as detailed as possible. Sorry for the large pictures but I want to give you the best information I can.
What I observed:
The white spots appeared over night about 3 months ago. Back then my ancistrus pair was breeding in one of the tubes the clowns usually slept in. The male ancistrus guarding the eggs was making sure everyone who tried to snatch one of the eggs was going to pay for it, so a lot of loaches were dinged and scratched at this time, but they usually healed up pretty quickly (days).
So when I saw my alpha clown like this for the first time, I wasn't worried because it looked like patterns of the ancistrus gill spikes, which are approximately spaced like the white dots on the body of the loach. Unfortunately they didn't heal or change since then. They are basically the same today. From what I can tell there aren't any new ones and the old ones don't go away or change either.
This is not ich or velvet. None of the other fish in my tank are affected, so I think I can categorically rule out anything contagious (3 months!).
- As you can see from the pictures the fins are quite torn apart and there's also some mould on them and on the gill plate.
- The lateral line organ is looking quite visibly pronounced (white).
- The eyes have a palish ring not present in the other loaches.
- Body colour is alot paler compared to the other (healthy) clowns.
These symptoms appeared shortly after the initial showing of the white spots.
The white spots themselves are clearly raised from the skin, like a pustule. Most of them are on the back third of the body, some on the middle third and none in the front third.
Behavior:
My alpha eats normally but obviously doesn't feel well. She's clamping her fins a lot of the time and when other loaches approach she submissively tilts to the side. She also isn't trying to enforce her alpha status anymore (most of the time). There's also more than usual scratching to be seen.
What I tried:
- I netted her out 2 times to give her a 6 hour bath in eSHa "Exit" and eSHa "2000", medicaments used to battle ich, velvet, skin lesions, mould and the like
- The bath immediately got rid of the mould and secondary infections but had no effect whatsoever on the white spots
- Unfortunately all the secondary problems came back just days after putting her back into the community tank
- I added 0.5 TSP of salt per gallon to the tank for a week. No effect.
Frankly, I didn't know what to do anymore and just watched for the last 2-3 weeks, hoping the fish would overcome this problem by itself. I was doing very large weekly waterchanges, too.
It doesn't look to me like she will manage to heal this -whatever it is- by herself, though. Any ideas of what else I could try would be greatly appreciated by me and my alpha clown!
Thanks for reading this,
Connor