I've just made the decision to euthanise a couple of Puntius semifasciolatus. They'd been suffering with this aliment for a while now and clean water/salt/garlic/Melafix dips didn't clear it up. I think I started a year ago with about 6 of these and these were the last two. They all succumbed over the year eventually and I'm going on holiday and having a friend look after the fish for a week so I can't expect them to keep up the water changes and observation. They are likely popsicles by now.



Starting as a sore, getting larger and redder. Showing infection around it. Eventual 'headstanding', eventual death.

Shame. I first thought they were getting sucked on by someone but they've been moved around a few times so who knows?

Yikes...looks nasty. I'm guessing it's some sort of bacterial infection, not sure though. Someone on here with more experience with fish diseases should be able to help you more than I can.

looks like septicemia but that stuff kills in day's not a year. it is for sure a bacterial infection. Best thing to do when you see things like this start out is get rid of the ones showing signs of it and treat the rest of the tank. Things like this can spread very fast and take out whole tanks of fish in day's.

The only stuff to treat this kind of illness is hard antibiotics. E.M. tabs ... you know hard meds. I would just rather get rid of the fish like you said instead of having to treat them with meds. They can cause your tanks to crash if not used right and they are also dangerous for humans to be playing with. when you use meds like that do not put your hands in the water unless you really need to.

Mela/pima fix are crap and are only good for reapiring fins and little cuts. it works great on turtles but not fish IMHO.

I hope it all works out for you

Saint is the scientist here but I'm going to chime in.

This is were QT tanks come in handy. I know your going to euthanise these fish but my responce is for people who dont want to euthanise there fish. Place the fish in a bare bottom QT tank. Add Erythromycin (E.M. for short). let the fish swim in it for 24 hours. After 24 hours add Tetracycline (T.C. for short) and again let the fish swim it it for 24 hours. You want to switch E.M. and T.C. off and on for a total of 4 doses (2 E.M. & 2 T.C.). Then do a 25% water change and repeat treatment for a seccond time. This is a hardcore treatment for infections. IMO Mela/pima fix arn't crap, They are a good anti-fungal/anti-bacterial medication. They help prevent infections like neosporin does for us. These medications are only to be used when there is an infection preasent.

I ran across this and thought it might help. Click

Coupla questions: How long from the time the red-spot appeared until the advanced stage ya show on the lower specimen? Any exopthalmy? Did the vent area become red/swollen? Were there sores in more than one spot? Think back on all of the barbs ya lost and try to remember anything relevant.

Definitely bacterial, may be able to narrow it down a bit more with a few answers.

WYite

Well. Red patch and a lump growing in size and severity eventually causing an open wound over the course of about two to three weeks. Open wound remaining for about a week depending if they picked up any other infection at the time. Healing over in most cases leaving a scar and usually a smaller lump within another week. If the fish made it through this then it would settle down for about a month or maybe two but eventually they'd be starting with another small red patch and lump, usually preceded by a white growth but some of these fish had so many successive cases that they were pretty beat up in that patch. Always in the same place too.

No eye bulging. No other inflammation or swelling. Occasional head standing when an open wound was bad I assume from loss of salts etc. They were otherwise active and eating and showing good colouration and seemed fine with it apart from when it was bad. I put it down to some kind of defect in the breed or internal infection they came with. Dealt with it with the usual methods and water changes. Occasionally I'd lose one to what I'd assume was an opportunistic infection so over the year they all went.

Apart from the two I stuck in the freezer though! I'm going away for a week and couldn't really expect the guy coming in to take care of the pets to baby two ill fish like I would.

Well I wish I could help but I am terrible a diagnostics.

Well apart from more frequent water changes when treatments failed I've mostly ignored it for a year so I've not exactly been on the ball. I've just been treating the secondary infections and giving them the chance to heal up. I'd like to know if it is some kind of parasite though, this morning I lost 4 honey gouramis out of the blue with no obvious signs of illness from the same tank. A few weeks back I also lost a L18 under the same conditions which apart from being a nice fish was worth some money.

Water tests out ok. Temp is fine, filters all working. I'm not sure what to put it down to. The gouramis for their appearance are usually fairly hardy.

What size is te tank? How long did you have the fish that died from the barbs to the plec? What are you feeding these fish? Do you see any stringy white poo?

To be honest I dont know how tthese fish have been alive for so long with those ulcers.

Your best bet now is to just tare down the tank and give it a nice bleach bath along with the gravel and other decor.

I do this all the time. If I find one dead fish it is tare down time and all the fish are put in holding tanks until theirs is cleaned and ready to house them. I dont take any risks when it comes to that.

I do have the worst luck in the world when it comes to having equipment go out on me I have taken some huge hits that way.

It works out at 47.7gal. We work in litres here. Had the barbs for 14 months. Had the plec for just over 12 months. No stringy white poo. Fish eat a couple of types of flake. Catfish wafers. Occasional bloodworm. The tank has been setup for just over 12 months. Really the tank has mostly been ok. I was used to the barbs being ill and occasionally fishing one out. The gold nugget plec was a shock but we'd had a week of temp hitting 32-34C and it was spending time at the surface maybe for oxygen. The gouramis this morning was surprising, I'm suspecting some kind of contamination or the fact I swirled the gravel around the day before and maybe released something. Also with them being labyrinth fish is it possible for cigarette smoke to kill them? My parents are visiting and both of them smoke like chimneys.

We added a shoal of tiger barbs last week and maybe they came with something unobservable which the gouramis didn't like too much.

Break the tank down and bleach it all? Urgh! I've got a spare tank, it would be possible but still. Urgh! I've always been told never to use bleach due to possible residue and because it isn't the 'liquid fire' which Barthes made it out to be. I think it has to have 20 minutes of contact to sterilise something.

Just checked the tanks before bed. I'm sure I'll find the remaining three gouramies dead tomorrow morning. They are 'resting' upside down against the filter but are still alive. Ho hum.

MY guess is MAI (motile aeromonad infection). Aeromonas are predominantly FW motile bacteria that take advantage of stress in fish to cause infection. MAI is stress induced and is one of the most common freshwater fish infections around. It is characterized by open wounds, bug-eye and infected ventral region, or any combo of 1-3 of these symptoms. The facts that normal antibiotics did not help and that there are no signs of internal infection points to an outside factor causing stress on your fish, opening the door for an Aeromonas infection. It also suggests that this bacterial infection originated externally. The placement of ulcers/ symptoms may differ dependent on the species of Aeromonas causing the infection. But they're all pretty close. A primary infection, overcrowding, temperature too high for the fish species, off-spec water parameters, and inadequate diet all are factors that increase stress and therefore the risk of MAI. So take a look again at these factors and see if any of them may have contributed. Also take another look at your gouramis, especially the ventral region. Natural color and size may hinder seein' any other symptoms.

There's somethin' like 150 or 200 species of Aeromanas world-wide, and many strains are immune to normal antibiotics, so the fact Pimafix and/or Melafix didn't help isn't indicative of a bad product. Just means ya didn't have the right drug for this particular strain. Antibiotics aren't necessarily the best way to go, though. In many cases simply correcting the stressor and allowing the fish's immune system to recover will correct the problem.

Live foods can introduce Aeromonas into a system. Were ya feedin' live bloodworms? Did the last two gold barbs show signs before the introduction of the tiger barbs? There's an additional stressor, adding robust, aggressive new tankmates. That's also an additional path for the introduction of Aeromonas. If this has been goin' on for a year, though, I'd say the bacteria were already present in your system.

Also, IME, gouramis and tiger barbs are not a good mix, tigers love to nip at the long pelvic fins. It may not be an infection gettin' the gouramis. Gouramis use their long, thin pelvic fins much like a cat uses it's whiskers for exploration, the pelvic fins are very sensitive. IIRC there are even "taste buds" on them. Unfortunately, those same pelvic fins are an enticing target for the barbs. You may not be witnessing it, but I bet the gouramis are gettin' harrassed, increasing their stress level. Get the gouramis into a separate tank from the barbs.

Quarantine tank. I can't stress the importance of a QT tank for isolating new arrivals and treating illnesses.

Breaking down the tank may not be a bad idea, but that doesn't necessarily mean that an infection won't reoccur. Bacteria are always present in a tank.

BTW, MAI can infect aquatic amphibians, as well.

WYite

I almost entirely agree with you Wyite.

My only thing would be is that if the ulcers were that bad, I most definitely would have treated 'em. Those skin lesions can be treated with most common broad spectrum antibiotics or potassium permanganate (KMnO4)

Hardcore infections you can treat with medicated food containing oxytetracycline or sulfadimethoxine and ormetoprim. According to the Department of Agriculture's testing will nuke internal Aeromonas infections so long as you do the dosings correctly.

Here in the UK most treatments are prescription only and would have required visiting a vet to obtain them. This sounds callous but without research and a few hundred miles of travel I'd have had to pay an absolute fortune even if I could obtain them locally in short order.

Lost the last of the gouramis this morning. Originally I said the water was 'fine' but I did only test for ammonia. This morning I tested the lot and found the ph is 8, maybe 8.5. It comes out of the tap at 7.6. If this has been like this for a fair old time I think this might have been a contributing factor towards why I lost the cat and might have been causing stress because this is moving now way past average. I think this might comes from a few pieces of shell/coral I've got in the tank as decoration. I have this in there for the snails and shrimps but I suppose it should come out. As I do regular water changes I think the constant dilution would prevent a build up of this order but bah. I did a change the day before the deaths but it was only a small one and I can't think it would have caused a huge rise in ph and sudden deaths. I can't see what changed else which would murder a bunch of gouramis in 24 hours, I'm still thinking some sort of contamination or unseen infection which came with the new fish. They've never really seemed bothered by the more boisterous tank mates, I've not seem them being harassed. There is lots of cover and floating plants which they liked to hang around in and nobody was going after them. If anything they harassed the snails.

The original golden barbs. Right. First off they were not in a correctly sized shoal. They were reduced in number and you could tell this caused them stress in the tank. Secondly they were sick most of the time/recovering most of the time. The last of them had been through 2-3 reoccurring cycles of this over the year. Food fine. Stocking fine. They were 'fat'. Ph we now know was very low. Temp sits at 24degrees but we've had some hot weather causing some fluctuations.

Wyomingite wrote:

MY guess is MAI (motile aeromonad infection). Aeromonas are predominantly FW motile bacteria that take advantage of stress in fish to cause infection. MAI is stress induced and is one of the most common freshwater fish infections around. It is characterized by open wounds, bug-eye and infected ventral region, or any combo of 1-3 of these symptoms. The facts that normal antibiotics did not help and that there are no signs of internal infection points to an outside factor causing stress on your fish, opening the door for an Aeromonas infection. It also suggests that this bacterial infection originated externally. The placement of ulcers/ symptoms may differ dependent on the species of Aeromonas causing the infection. But they're all pretty close. A primary infection, overcrowding, temperature too high for the fish species, off-spec water parameters, and inadequate diet all are factors that increase stress and therefore the risk of MAI. So take a look again at these factors and see if any of them may have contributed. Also take another look at your gouramis, especially the ventral region. Natural color and size may hinder seein' any other symptoms.

There's somethin' like 150 or 200 species of Aeromanas world-wide, and many strains are immune to normal antibiotics, so the fact Pimafix and/or Melafix didn't help isn't indicative of a bad product. Just means ya didn't have the right drug for this particular strain. Antibiotics aren't necessarily the best way to go, though. In many cases simply correcting the stressor and allowing the fish's immune system to recover will correct the problem.

Live foods can introduce Aeromonas into a system. Were ya feedin' live bloodworms? Did the last two gold barbs show signs before the introduction of the tiger barbs? There's an additional stressor, adding robust, aggressive new tankmates. That's also an additional path for the introduction of Aeromonas. If this has been goin' on for a year, though, I'd say the bacteria were already present in your system.

Also, IME, gouramis and tiger barbs are not a good mix, tigers love to nip at the long pelvic fins. It may not be an infection gettin' the gouramis. Gouramis use their long, thin pelvic fins much like a cat uses it's whiskers for exploration, the pelvic fins are very sensitive. IIRC there are even "taste buds" on them. Unfortunately, those same pelvic fins are an enticing target for the barbs. You may not be witnessing it, but I bet the gouramis are gettin' harrassed, increasing their stress level. Get the gouramis into a separate tank from the barbs.

Quarantine tank. I can't stress the importance of a QT tank for isolating new arrivals and treating illnesses.

Breaking down the tank may not be a bad idea, but that doesn't necessarily mean that an infection won't reoccur. Bacteria are always present in a tank.

BTW, MAI can infect aquatic amphibians, as well.

WYite

NOW THAT IS INFO

As for bleach if you use it I forgot to mention 10-1 with water 10 being the water and it works well.

Stingy with the meds over there eh? The potassium permanganate is available at most pool/hot tub stores here, so there may be a work around on that if it comes up again in the future.

So you can't even get basic ich cures and the like without a prescription from a vet over there?

I'd likely be able to get potassium permanganate with some research but anything resembling an antibiotic is schedule 6 and requires a veterinary prescription. All we have access to are about three brands of off the counter fish treatments which TBH have moderate/mixed successes because they'll not even say what it isn't the bottle as an active ingredient.

Honestly. Most of the time we are fumbling around with salt baths/garlic. Off the counter medications usually don't help for most people kill more fish than they save.