Loaches Online Forum

Hi,
I have been reading on this forum for awhile but this is my first post and I need advice. This Sunday I stopped by my LFS and saw that there were yoyo loaches in one of the tanks. I was shocked how small they were - barely half inch. I have 10 yoyo loaches, but they were much bigger when I bought them. In addition one of the babies was missing an eye ( they were together with fairly large swordtails) and was obviously in distress. I took home the one with the missing eye and another one to keep him a company. They are in a small quarantine tank at the moment. I treated them with levamisol and have them on maracyn-2 +maracyn to prevent infection in the missing eye. I feed them dry food (different kinds of pellets) in the morning and bloodworms in the evening. The food seem to be too big for them but I do not have anything else. The healthy baby seem to be doing a little better, but the one with the missing eye is trying to hide all the time and I worry that he is not going to make it. What else should I be doing in this situation?
I feel that it should not be allowed to sell fish that small, they will have a hard time surviving in an average home aquarium.

Hi natalia, welcome to Loaches!
Crush the dry food as fine as you can. At the bottom of the jar the bloodworms will be powder.
Add lots of live plants like Java Moss and other fine leaved plants. There are a lot of microorganisms among the leaves that very small fish can eat.
Look for frozen Baby Brine Shrimp, or raise your own. Look for other very small live foods (some aquarium magazines have ads, and on line sources).
Hikari makes a baby fish food that is a dry powder, in a green envelope, and several other companies make a slightly larger granule that they might be able to eat. New Life Spectrum makes one called Grow that is not powder, but is pretty fine.
Try cooked vegetables, too. A different one each day, pretty well cooked. Not mush, but soft enough for them to work on.

I would keep these guys on a very thin layer of sand so they do not have to root through anything to find food, but enough that the bottom of the tank is not totally bare. Very easy to clean this way, too.

Diana,
Thanks for the info. I wil try to feed as you suggested. I noticed that both fish are quite fond of frozen bloodworms, but I do need to supplement these with some vitaminized food. Apart from zucchini, what vegetables would you recommend? I will add sand on the bottom I have a very fine white sand from Caribsea and the Java moss is already in the tank.
Let's see how this all works.