|
|
| |
| An Ounce of Prevention... |
Before we turn to treating diseases, lets take a minute to discuss how to avoid ever having to do so. There are three pillars of aquarium fish health: (1) buy only good, healthy specimens; (2) provide a suitable, stable environment to limit stress; (3) keep infectious agents out of the aquarium as much as possible. If you can do these three things consistently, you should have fewer problems with diseases. The first is pretty easy to accomplish and is discussed in depth in the stocking section. Briefly, you want fish that are alert and show no obvious outward signs of disease. Keeping the aquarium environment stable and hospitable means doing regular water changes and keeping the filter well-maintained. It also means keeping the temperature, pH and other water quality parameters within acceptable ranges, and more importantly stable. Rapid changes in water quality are extremely stressful for fish and makes them vulnerable to all manner of pathogens. It doesn't end here though. Limiting stress requires providing an appropriate physical environment as well. Any sort of stress will lower a fish's immunity to infectious disease. The most effective way to keep disease causing organisms out of your aquarium is to quarantine every new arrival before adding them to the display. The quarantine should last 2 to 4 weeks to ensure that new fish are strong, healthy, and disease-free. One other important advantage of quarantining is that it gives the new arrival a chance to rest and recuperate after a journey that might literally have brought it halfway around the world to your LFS. This time to rest can make it easier for the newbie when it comes time to be introduced to the new tank where it might have to fight for a territory. Brief dips (30 seconds to 10 minutes) in methylene blue or salt water are another good prophylactic measure since these will usually kill most external pathogens.
Even if you do everything right, chances are you will eventually have an outbreak of disease. When this happens it is important to be able to recognize the signs so you can provide appropriate treatment. Signs of disease are sometimes obvious, like white fluffy spots on the skin and fins, but more often they are ambigous, like gulping and gasping at the surface. Other ambigous symptoms include "flashing" (fish dart wildly through the water), scratching on gravel or decorations, clamped fins, eroded fins, loss of appetite, rapid gill movements, gasping, and refusing to leave the surface of the water. Because so many so many disease attack the skin and gills, the symptoms are very similar to symptoms of water quality problems like chlorine or ammonia poisoning or oxygen stress. For this reason, the first thing to do when one of your fish is displaying any of these symptoms is check the water. More often than not the cause of these symptoms is the water quality, and not any disease. I am sure many aquarists treat symptoms with chemicals that are best adressed with a good water change!
If your fish are showing signs of disease and the water quality checks out (no ammonia or nitrite, low nitrate, no chlorine, copper or other heavy metals) then it is time to diagnose and treat the disease. As I have said elsewhere on this site, never add midications to the main tank. The gravel and decorations, even the silicone sealant in the aquarium absorb many medications, making it difficult to remove them once the treatment is over. Also, almost all medications will wipe out the biological filter as well as the disease organisms. This often causes an ammonia spike just when your fish aren't feeling well anyway! Finally, a hospital tank, cheap filter, and heater is not very expensive compared with the cost of the main system and livestock. There are a dizzying array of medications out there, and it is difficult to know which medication to use in a given situation. The first step is to determine if the infection is bacterial, protozoal, fungal or parasitic. One general treatment is dipping in a 3% NaCl (non-iodized table salt) solution. This will shrivel up most freshwater pathogens. Fin rot, red streaks on the body and/or fins and cloudy eyes are almost always caused by bacterial infections and should be treated with an antibiotic like spectrogram (nitrofurazone & kanamycin), kanamycin, erythromycin or tetracycline or furan compounds like furanace. Funguses most often appear as very fluffy white or gray tufts on the skin or mouth and are treated with sulfa drugs like sulfamethazine, sulfacetamide, or sulfathiazole. Protozoans like ich (Ichthyophthirius multifilius) and oodinium (Oodinium ocellatum) should be treated with elevated temperature (80-84°F), copper, formalin, or malachite green (a dye). All of these anti-protozoal treatments should be used with caution since they are almost equally harmful to fish and protozoans. External parasites like flat worms (flukes) or crustaceans are treatable with formalin and organophosphates (ingredient in many pesticides). |
| |
|
|
|
|
