mystery "illness", help! (finrot etc)

In message , TYNK 7
writes
Subject: thanks NetMax/TYNK
From: sophie
Date: 12/1/2004 1:28 PM Central Standard Time
Message-id:

In message , NetMax
writes
"sophie" wrote in message
...

or: "Do Fish Get Viruses?"

For quite a while now I have had three loaches (misgurnus mizolepis,
very similar to the dojo) in quarantine. I've had one for a week longer
than the others and it has never had a problem. I have posted about
them before and I'm now even more puzzled than I was.

When I got the second two they were very shy initially - unlike the
first one, which enjoys chewing/feeling fingers - but one fairly
quickly became very active, feeding happily, swimming about in a mad
loach-y kind of way, etc. The other one hid. And hid. And was generally
very lethargic, eating nothing, lying about with occasional rapid and
erratic breathing. I wondered about parasites, flukes, stress, etc.
This went on for quite a while - at least a couple of weeks - and
eventually it started to eat a little if handfed. After another week it
perked up and started behaving normally, eating normally etc. However
the other loach I bought with it then started to become very pale and
developed pink thickened pectoral fins one of which frayed and split.
I'm doing frequent water changes and I've treated with (waterlife's)
myxazin, which in all honesty doesn't seem to have helped a lot, though
the loach has its colour back and is now using its fins properly -
though they are still pink. I suspect that its friend - the one that
was originally unwell - may have a small split in one pectoral fin,
though it moves too quickly to get a good look in the water and I don't
want to pull its fins about out of water to have a look in case that
exacerbates the problem. There is very occasional flashing - or it
would be flashing in any other fish; with these I'm inclined to think
it might well just be general loach-y lunacy as it only happens
occasionally and usually at feeding time.

I can't think of any disease that fits these symptoms. I know finrot is
often a water quality issue; ammonia and nitrites are nil. I don't have
a nitrates kit but I don't have any algae which I think would be an
indicator for high nitrates? What I did have for a while is a pH
problem as we have very soft, high pH water which drops rapidly, but
buffering with a lot of coral gravel has stabilised it.

Do fish get viruses?

If this is likely to be a virus, when might it be safe (if ever!) to
introduce these fish to my main tank?

Is there anything else I can do? (I'm thinking salt). The man who owns
my favourite LFS (not where I got these loaches) said that the reason
he has stopped stocking weather loaches is because for the last few
years they have come in in a mess with a low survival rate for no
specific reason he can pinpoint.

any ideas? all will be received with huge gratitude...


--
sophie

NetMax and Tynk, thank you so much for your responses, I'm sorry to have
ignored them until now. I'm very grateful for your help.

How much water can you change and how often?

I've been doing about a third of the tank volume every two days; I
decided not to do it every day in case it stressed the fish too much.
They are _all_ behaving normally and happily now, colour is normal too;
the frayed fins are still frayed, but I'm assuming that they will take a
while to grow back anyway. The only thing I'm concerned about now is
that the fish which was originally off-colour (literally and
figuratively) has a "kink" in it's spine which I am 99.9% positive was
not there earlier. (I have a goldfish which was in this tank for a while
develop a kink, it is otherwise in apparently perfect health.) These
ever-changing symptoms are baffling me, though I do think it must have
been a (relatively non-infectious) virus. The only scary illness with
bent spines I can think of is fish TB, and this doesn't seem to have any
of the other symptoms - and the fact that they're getting better not
worse would seem to argue against it too.

I'm thinking that after another three or four weeks if they still seem
healthy it should be ok to add them to the main tank?


Aggressive water changes
can be successful when a persistent but non-lethal contagion seems to
just hang around. It sounds bacterial in origin, but if the fish are not
doing that badly, then their immune system might be working on it
properly. The water changes will dilute the contagion's concentration,
sometimes giving the upper hand to the fish. Having no gravel also helps
during this w/c strategy as the stagnant water and the substrate surface
can act to 'house' nasties.

As for fish viruses, yes, and I've found that loaches (like Dojos) are
particularly susceptible (perhaps a combination of their being scaleless
and sitting on the substrate). The early indicator is always the colour
changes. I've seen them with cyst-like protrusions quite often (usually
along their flanks). You could add medicated foods to your w/c regime.
It's too bad that there isn't a marketed automatic water change system
readily available for consumers, as this is what would work best for
aggressive w/c's.

FWIW, in my limited experience, I've never seen loach 'virus' symptoms
expressed on non-loach tank-mates, but I wouldn't take that to the bank.

Best wishes sophie.

--
sophie



Just an FYI....
There are several symptoms of fish TB.

Thanks, Tynk;

I knew about the TB symptoms, but for the moment I'd decided that as
_all_ the other symptoms are missing (unless finrot counts as open
lesions??), except for colour loss which got better - and I'd understood
that colour loss is a pretty general symptom of stress anyway - I
shouldn't be jumping to conclusions about TB just yet. Am I being silly?
I'll certainly be quarantining them for another few weeks, but if TB can
be there with no symptoms for years, how long do I need to wait!?

could a bent spine by itself just be injury? this particular loach loves
messing about by the filter (in-tank fluval 1+)...

and I think labs doing tests on m fish are very hard to come by and very
expensive...

I appreciate your time and the explanation, it's very welcome.


Oddly, a fish can have one or more symptoms in their body and the other fish in
the tank show no symptoms..yet are still infected.
Another odd fact with TB is that different fish in the same tank can show
totally different symptoms of the same disease.
TB is actually kind of common, but is often mistaken because it's symptoms
mimic several other diseases.
Typical symptoms a
Bent spine
Open lesions (soars that won't heal or grow larger).
Sunken in Belly
Swollen Belly
Black spots that grow larger or multiply
Tumors
Unexplained death
Pop Eye
Listless behavior
Pale in color
A fish can live many years showing no symptoms at all, yet still pass it on and
infect healthy fish it comes into contact with.
The disease can lay dormant for many years and show up at any time, but it's
usually after something traumatic happens (either to it or to the tank).

So, you see there are several other symptoms of fish TB besides a bent spine.
Many of them are sure signs of other diseases, so it's easily missed.
The only way to be 100% sure it is TB is to have a lab do a culture for it from
the suspected fish.

If these fish are (even though it's only a certain one so far that is showing a
bent spine), suspected of having TB, I would wait on adding any of the fish in
that tank to a main tank.
I would watch the remaining fish to show any symptoms of what was listed above.




--
sophie