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my fish blow up like a blow fish and die...why?
- Thread starter Crystal
- Start date
Dropsy is the condition your fish have.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_dropsy
Dropsy is caused from a bacterial infection causing the fluids in the body build up and cause the fish to bloat up and the scales to protrude.
Your best bet is to separate the sick ones from the healthy and to treat the sick ones in a small quarantine tank.
A common treatment is to add an antibiotic to the food. With flake food, use about 1% of antibiotic and carefully mix it in. If you keep the fish hungry they should eagerly eat the mixture before the antibiotic dissipates.
Antibiotics usually come in capsules of 250 mg. If added to 25 grams of flake food, one capsule should be enough to treat dozens of fish, or one fish quite a number of times.
A good antibiotic that I've used is chloromycetin (chloramphenicol) or tetracycline.
If you feed your fish frozen foods or chopped foods, try to use the same ratio with mixing. As a last resort add at most 10 mg per liter of water.
Now that deals with the immediate problem. The next part of the problem is to check your water quality. I'd suggest doing a 50% water change if you're dealing with one or two sick fish, but if all of them are dying then it might not be a bad idea to do a complete tear-down of the tank, clean everything with scalding hot water, and restart the tank using one of the nitrifying bacteria products like Safe-Start.
If you can save your fish, then you really need to keep up on the water quality. Consider a new filter of at least one-and-a-half to two times the rating for your tank (say 50-60 gallon rating for a 30 gallon tank as an example) and get one of the filters that use the biomax beads which allow you to change out the filter media but keeps the healthy bacteria in good shape.
Say an Aquaclear if you need to go cheap (but still good quality) or if you can swing it, a Fluval 05 series canister filter.
Also you need to commit to 25% weekly water changes. You don't have to be a slave to it, you can miss a week here and there, change days, etc...but water changes need to be regular to keep the water quality healthy.
Good luck. Dropsy is a nasty bugger and I'm sorry to say that by the time you see the pinecone scales...it is often too late, the pressure has already damaged organs. But if you act quickly you can save the rest of the tank.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_dropsy
Dropsy is caused from a bacterial infection causing the fluids in the body build up and cause the fish to bloat up and the scales to protrude.
Your best bet is to separate the sick ones from the healthy and to treat the sick ones in a small quarantine tank.
A common treatment is to add an antibiotic to the food. With flake food, use about 1% of antibiotic and carefully mix it in. If you keep the fish hungry they should eagerly eat the mixture before the antibiotic dissipates.
Antibiotics usually come in capsules of 250 mg. If added to 25 grams of flake food, one capsule should be enough to treat dozens of fish, or one fish quite a number of times.
A good antibiotic that I've used is chloromycetin (chloramphenicol) or tetracycline.
If you feed your fish frozen foods or chopped foods, try to use the same ratio with mixing. As a last resort add at most 10 mg per liter of water.
Now that deals with the immediate problem. The next part of the problem is to check your water quality. I'd suggest doing a 50% water change if you're dealing with one or two sick fish, but if all of them are dying then it might not be a bad idea to do a complete tear-down of the tank, clean everything with scalding hot water, and restart the tank using one of the nitrifying bacteria products like Safe-Start.
If you can save your fish, then you really need to keep up on the water quality. Consider a new filter of at least one-and-a-half to two times the rating for your tank (say 50-60 gallon rating for a 30 gallon tank as an example) and get one of the filters that use the biomax beads which allow you to change out the filter media but keeps the healthy bacteria in good shape.
Say an Aquaclear if you need to go cheap (but still good quality) or if you can swing it, a Fluval 05 series canister filter.
Also you need to commit to 25% weekly water changes. You don't have to be a slave to it, you can miss a week here and there, change days, etc...but water changes need to be regular to keep the water quality healthy.
Good luck. Dropsy is a nasty bugger and I'm sorry to say that by the time you see the pinecone scales...it is often too late, the pressure has already damaged organs. But if you act quickly you can save the rest of the tank.