Why did they die?

Well I have my brother's 125 gallon set up in our new place. I was keeping some pumpkinseeds,bluegills and black crappie all purchased from aquaculture stores. Well I noticed after about a month, ick started to show up on a few bluegills, and the chaetostomas in there also started to catch it. I treated the tank as directed (actually may have been under treated) with the "quick cure" by I believe jungle. I had also added a whisper air pump rated for 30 gallons to add more oxygen. After the first treatment, the next day everyone seemed to be getting better. THen the next day when I did the treatment, i turned the lights off right after and went to bed. I then went yesterday to administer the final treatment (as directed) and ALL of my sunfish were laying on their sides, DEAD, on the bottom. The chaetostomas seemed to be OK, the Longfin bristlenose were great, but everyone else was either dead or died as I watched.

In the instructions, no where did it say to do a water change. i removed the carbon as explained. It only mentioned a waterchange IF a 4th treatment was to be adminstered. What happened? Water conditions all checked out in the great range, didn't notice anything out of the ordinary in the testing (didn't record the results, but it was the normal zone.)

So what happened to my sunfish (well other than die)?

Water conditions all checked out in the great range, didn't notice anything out of the ordinary in the testing (didn't record the results, but it was the normal zone.)

My first comment, and the immediate red flag that hit me, was that this statement is odd. If water conditions all checked out, then why were the fish sick in the first place? I've never had a case of ich that wasn't also accompanied by either
1. ammonia above 0 ppm
2. nitrite above 0 ppm
3. nitrate high. Most fish don't like it above 30 ppm but Lepomis are special and can usually handle more.
What were the actual numbers that you got for ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate? If they really were at 0, 0, and less than thirty, then that's hugely telling. It means there's something insidious there that you can't see causing mass discomfort.

Ich is an opportunistic pathogen. It only really shows symptoms in fish whose immune system is already compromised by another problem. This sounds like poisoning. There was something else wrong in your aquarium, something that affected every single fish in that tank except the plecos. So you have to ask yourself what the difference was between the plecos and everybody else. They eat different foods, so maybe the food was tainted. Or maybe plecos are just as a family less sensitive to whatever was poisoning the lepomis. This might hint at something the plecos would have to build a resistance to in their natural habitat that lepomis wouldn't. Maybe one of your tank decorations is deteriorating into something toxic.

It sounds like the medication was the final blow. These fish were being killed by something all right, but it wasn't the ich. Their immune system had been weakened and deteriorated by some other factor to the point where even a small, underdose of meds was capable of taking them out. The other alternative is that you got a bad batch of meds, which, tainted with poison, killed your fish. But that probably would have taken out the plecos, too. The way to test that is to get a different tank with the same species of fish that died, and to give them the medication. If they kick the bucket then you got a batch batch of meds, especially if your experiment group doesn't have ich.

Conclusion: Necropsy. If you've looked inside fish before and you know what it's supposed to look like, fish that died at a young age from a pathogen can often have glaringly obvious enlargements and discolorations. Cut 'em open and see what's inside. If you have access to a nice high powered microscope, look at what's there. Pathogens aren't invisible, just really tiny.

Edit: Oh, and in the future, avoid using meds until after you've tried providing the fish with clean water and waiting to see if their immune systems can bounce back. You would be surprised how refreshing a water change can be for fish. Especially for a case of ich, or any of the other ubiquitous pathogens that rely upon a diminished immune system. I'm not trying to convince you to not use meds when your fish have camallanus worm or something like that. When that's there, there's a problem. But ich is usually there already, and has been there for a while. You just don't notice it until it flares up.

Edited by EricaWieser, 06 January 2012 - 03:29 PM.

Edit: Oh, and in the future, avoid using meds until after you've tried providing the fish with clean water and waiting to see if their immune systems can bounce back. You would be surprised how refreshing a water change can be for fish. Especially for a case of ich, or any of the other ubiquitous pathogens that rely upon a diminished immune system. I'm not trying to convince you to not use meds when your fish have camallanus worm or something like that. When that's there, there's a problem. But ich is usually there already, and has been there for a while. You just don't notice it until it flares up.

Erica, I typically do water changes of 25% per week on this tank, i just wasn't doing water changes during treatment period due to it not telling me to (so I ended up 3 days late on my water change for the week.)

I try to keep my tanks as clean as possible. As I stated, I didn't record the numbers as everything checked out as normal for levels within the tank. I think if ANYTHING was above the 0 ppm, Nitrate might have been near 10, but that would have been it.

I WAS and avid L# pleco breeder, so I keep the water quality high and do frequent water changes due to the history with them.

When the first signs of Ick showed up, I was baffled because there was nothing wrong and no new introductions, which is why this who crash messes with my head.

Just as a side note can't you treat ich by raising water temps for a period of time?

Just as a side note can't you treat ich by raising water temps for a period of time?

It makes the ich's life cycle go faster, which means it takes less time to get to the stage of the life cycle where the parasite is free swimming and vulnerable to medication. But don't raise the temperature high enough to stress your fish.

NVCichlids, what medication did you use specifically?

Edited by EricaWieser, 07 January 2012 - 02:13 AM.

http://www.cichlid-f...rticles/ich.php

Here is a link to an interesting article on ich treatment. Since you mentioned using "Jungle", I believe this particular paragragh from the article above may be of interest:

"Formalin is a form of formaldehyde and is often used by fish farmers and home aquarists to treat ich. It can be purchased under its chemical name, or found as the active ingredient in products such as Ick Guard II® by Jungle, and Formalite III® by Aquatronics (which also contains copper). While it is non-staining and said to be safe for live plants (and at lower dosages…) scaleless fish, eggs and fry, it is nevertheless a strong chemical – a preservative for biological specimens (AKA embalming fluid). It may damage your biological filter, deplete oxygen levels in the aquarium, and destroy invertebrates and weak fish. Its toxicity increases with water temperature and acidity, making it a questionable choice for soft water fish."

Don't know if that's the particular ingredient in yours or what your water temperature and PH is, but I hope this helps.
Sure sorry about your fish.

Steve.

Edited by frogwhacker, 07 January 2012 - 01:54 PM.

I find it very hard to believe that formalin or other medication, or ammonia & nitrite for that matter, could have killed all your bluegills while Chaetostoma and Ancistrus were unaffected. I'm wondering if maybe you had a sunfish-specific disease (other than ich) that didnt affect the catfish.

I only faced Ich twice and it's in my experience the easiest to cure aquarium disease (it actually responds to treatment). I have observed that some fish are more vulnerable to ich and its treatment than others. (I only lost a pleco and my golden shiners to it).

Ich is why I don't try keeping golden shiners before. The two times I faced it both came after adding goldens to my tank and the fish that ich and/or ich treatment killed were mainly goldens. This could just be coincidence but still it makes me nervous about once more trying that species.

I find it very hard to believe that formalin or other medication, or ammonia & nitrite for that matter, could have killed all your bluegills while Chaetostoma and Ancistrus were unaffected. I'm wondering if maybe you had a sunfish-specific disease (other than ich) that didnt affect the catfish.

I agree, it certainly does seem like it would have killed off the plecos first. My logic on this was that it sounds like the sunfish were the first to show signs of ich, which could have already caused gill damage in them, causing them to weaken. I also wondered about the possibility of there being a heater in the tank for the sake of the plecos. Water PH is also something that I'm forced to think about myself as I'm limited to rainwater which is quite acidic, although I have no idea what NVCichlid's water source is. These were just combinations of possibilities I was tossing around in my head. There are a lot of "ifs" here so I probably shouldn't have even posted it.

Steve.

When I get ich in any of my tanks I raise the temps in my tanks to about 85 and run a UV filter.

I would never wait to see if a parasitic infection cleared up just by giving the fish better conditions. Once you have the parasites they are not going to go away, and in the case of white spot, the longer you wait, the worse the condition will get.

High temps kill whitespot, elevate temps above 30oC for five days (it's either five or ten, I'd have to google it). Just about any fish from the southern USA will survive these temps I would think, especially Lepomis. You can also use 10 grams per liter of salt for 10 days. All Australian fishes will survive this, not sure about North American families though.

I've always used quick cure for white spot and I think it is awesome, that is my first choice if I can't use temperature or salt to kill it.

Maybe what you had wasn't white spot after all?

Cheers
Peter

I would never wait to see if a parasitic infection cleared up just by giving the fish better conditions. Once you have the parasites they are not going to go away, and in the case of white spot, the longer you wait, the worse the condition will get.

But ichthyophthirius multifilis is one of those diseases that never really goes away. It's present in nearly all tanks, and you can't ever hope to completely remove it. To quote Stephen Meyer of http://www.fishchann...ridge-wood.aspx ,

"Ich is one of those fish parasites that is always present on goldfish to some small degree, and it is ubiquitous to the fish aquarium environment. Given a fish aquarium with five or six fish, I can always find a few individual ich parasites. Healthy goldfish can easily keep these organisms under control, so they do not become a disease problem.

However, when goldfish health begins to decline (that is, when they get stressed by poor water conditions, overcrowding or poor nutrition), their ability to control ich declines quickly, and the parasite multiplies. In an unhealthy aquarium — and especially in an aquarium where one or more fish are especially weak - the parasite population will explode and infect all the fish."

Medication can be the straw that broke the camel's back. It can kill fish who are already weakened by pathogens. That's why I was saying that if your fish were vulnerable to the ich because of dirty water, cleaning the water and not using medication would allow them to heal themselves.

Medication can be the straw that broke the camel's back. It can kill fish who are already weakened by pathogens. That's why I was saying that if your fish were vulnerable to the ich because of dirty water, cleaning the water and not using medication would allow them to heal themselves.

...Or it could result in the parasites killing the already weakened fish. I've never had a problem arise from treating Ich using medications such as Quick Cure. I have, however, lost a number of prized fish using the salt-and-raise-the-temperature method.

I liken it to having a bacterial infection (like Strep). Yes, there are bacteria all over, and you may have gotten sick because you put your system under stress (no sleep, poor diet, whatever). You can get all the rest you want and eat chicken soup until you start clucking, but you'll still have the best chance of kicking it by taking antibiotics. If your system is weakened, it makes it that much harder to overcome illness on your own.

I liken it to having a bacterial infection (like Strep). Yes, there are bacteria all over, and you may have gotten sick because you put your system under stress (no sleep, poor diet, whatever). You can get all the rest you want and eat chicken soup until you start clucking, but you'll still have the best chance of kicking it by taking antibiotics.

Honestly I've only experienced ich a very few times. This was back during my first year of fishkeeping, when the water was occasionally extremely gross. Wow, this makes me feel kind of old now, but now that I think about it I haven't had any issues with ich for four solid years now. I remember treating the first few times with malachite green or methylene blue or something like that, but treating it didn't save every fish and it didn't answer the question of why the fish had the ich in the first place, and how to prevent it from getting it again. After a while when I saw ich, my response was just to do water changes. That seemed to work better.

I have, however, had recent experience with mycobacterium marinum. To me, that is the pathogen that I'm really talking about here. If you watch this video you can repeatedly see one sick fish swimming in and out of the picture amongst the rest of the fish, which are healthy. This was after using antibiotics months earlier and thinking (incorrectly) that the tank was free of the marinum. It was still present.



It was difficult to accept, but that pathogen was present in my tanks for almost two years. I would go three months without seeing symptoms, and then a fish would start to age or have a different disease that would weaken the immune system, and it would suddenly show signs of M. marinum, too. The pathogen would choose to take out entire species while sparing others. The Xiphophorus montezumae all succumbed to it, over a dozen fish dying while every single X. hellerii remained symptom free: youtube.com/watch?v=yjmeo46nBa4 . I later decided, after talking to a montezumae breeder in southeast asia who had the same problem, that montezumae had compromised immune systems at high temperatures, so the heater is really what killed them.

I changed what I was doing and how the tank was set up, and kept the water quality high for many months in a row. The tank might still have M. marinum, I can't prove that it doesn't, but I can say that there have been no outbreaks for nearly a year.

Anyway, my point is, there are some pathogens that are ubiquitous. Your tank has them right now even though your fish isn't showing any symptoms of it. There is no medication that can guarantee to sterilize your aquarium of it, and if the fish continue to be stressed they will relapse again. Ich is in most circles regarded to be one of these types of diseases, although I can't say that from firsthand experience because my fish haven't had ich in the past four years. Mycobacterium marinum definitely was, though. AIDS is a good example of this. What kills AIDS patients in the end isn't the HIV virus itself. They die instead of ubiquitous, every day bacteria that were always present and never would have been a problem, if they hadn't lacked the ability to fight it off. Ich and M. marinum are kind of like that. There has to be something else wrong to decrease the fish's immune system to make ich/marinum a problem. Fix the immune system, and you fix the problem.

All I'm saying is, there has to be some underlying problem that caused the ich to break out in the first place. Healthy people don't get the kind of pneumonia that people with end stage AIDS get. Healthy fish don't get ich. And medication CAN kill fish. It's just like how even your favorite most helpful cold medications can cause side effects like stuffy head and drowsiness. When a severely ill fish/person experiences side effects from medications on top of their preexisting problems, sometimes that stress can be enough to push them over the edge and kill them. It really does happen, and is something I see my cancer biology coworkers consider every day as they weigh the pros and cons of chemotherapy medication killing a person versus the cancer killing a person. Medicine has drawbacks. Sometimes if there's a chance that the immune system recovering can heal the person/fish, it's worth it to spend a few days seeing if they bounce back before administering meds and stressing them more.

Edited by EricaWieser, 08 January 2012 - 05:41 PM.

You're right about many infectious diseases being nearly impossible to avoid or eradicate, especially those like Myco that can live virtually anywhere and dont need a fish host to survive. But the "underlying problem" in this case may be captivity itself. Healthy fish in excellent water quality CAN catch diseases and get sick from other fish, since they're exposed to much greater density of pathogens in captivity than in the wild.

quote name='EricaWieser' timestamp='1326061194' post='95506']
All I'm saying is, there has to be some underlying problem that caused the ich to break out in the first place. ... Healthy fish don't get ich. [/quote]

Thanks for the responses guys. I have been reading everything. I have not noticed any thing in regards to an "underlying issue". I know fish don't get sick without something else being wrong, but I cannot find what that other thing may have been. I have since drained the tank and cleaned everything out. New sand was added and the old stuff was removed. Baked the driftwood again to ensure that that is clean and sterile and all plants have been cleaned as well (they were primarely anubias, so it is easy to "clean" them.)

I am going to wait and refill the tank in a couple of weeks and see how things go.


BTW, about the raising the temp, couldn't have been done as I do not own any heaters. I would have had to go out and buy them.

So in a healthy wild population a out of control disease is rare? Now I am thinking of the fish kill last summer on Spofford Lake where a common and normal bacteria hit multiple species (mostly sunfish but it hit others too) and was blamed on post spawning stress. Wouldn't a spawn be natural enough that it wouldn't have THAT big on an effect on its own.

spawning can be very stressful on fish. Think about it, they guard their beds against everything that moves, they do not eat (much if at all) during the guarding phaze and then by the time the young are let free from protection, there is that many more things in the water needing food. I would think that the spawn would be a huge stress/trigger for the fish. I mean, we see what happens to the salmon (well that is an extreme, but it is a point.)

Edit: Coming to think about it, I know my fish were too young to spawn, but they were starting to mark territories and defend them. could this (small?) stressor cause the weakened system allowing ich to kick in?

Edited by NVCichlids, 13 January 2012 - 10:33 AM.

Edit: Coming to think about it, I know my fish were too young to spawn, but they were starting to mark territories and defend them. could this (small?) stressor cause the weakened system allowing ich to kick in?

Depends on how stressed they were and how close their terretories are. I have lost sunfish in the past from terretorial stress but usually it's only the more submissive one who gets sick.