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Treating something external with no impact on mortality or behavior - So confused


Okayestaquarist
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I would love some help with my Limias. Any advice would be appreciated. I have lots of meetings today and kids to move around so my answers to questions may be a little slow.

I have a Limia colony in a 40 gallon breeder that has been going for about four years. There are also three remnants of a bigger group of corydoras and five otocinclus. It is very heavily planted and must have at least 50 Limias of different ages. I keep the tank about 74 degrees.

Here is what is what is going on. About three months ago I noticed some white irregular, not round, spots on my hunchbacked Limias. I then noticed it on a few more. It is never on more than five or ten fish at a time. I have only found one dead female since and she was very big and had no spots. I don't see any flashing, rubbing, or other behavioral changes. They eat heartily and breed like crazy. I attached a picture of one for reference. It is blurry but you can see the white coating.

It is messing up my whole system. I need to trade these soon to keep the population down and this tank produces duckweed to feed my goldfish. I also wanted to add some crazy cute dwarf red platies to this tank.

So far, I have done three ICHX treatments and am now on day 5 of a paracleanse treatment. I have also been changing the water more often because of treatments. My bacterial cycle seems to be in good shape. I assumed Ich. I checked in with a helpful LFS owner who said he saw someone's Corys with a similar issue. He wondered if maybe it was either a form of velvet or anchor worms or flukes of some rare sort. Neither treatment has made a difference.

When I checked my parameters using Tetra strips, I noticed my water is pretty soft. I have been assuming illness but could this be caused by a lack of minerals in the water? 

Nitrates - under 20
Nitrite - 0
Hardness - 25 (I just noticed that this has changed, it used to be pretty hard, we do have a water softener.)
Chlorine - 0
Alkalinity - 180 - 300
PH - 8.4

Ammonia is zero.

IMG_4134.jpeg

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Could be. I haven't worked with limias before, but both my mollies and platies had problems when my GH was too low, so I ended up treating them in a quarantine tank with 1 Tbsp aquarium salt per 1 gallon of water in the short term (great for external diseases like fungus and parasites) and dosing Seachem Equilibrium in the long term. The extra minerals made my plants perk up as well, so now I try to keep at least 7-10° GH.

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I’m wondering if this might be columnaris. (Same issue @Colu has identified). I’d reach out to Greg Sage at Select Aquatics — selectaquatics@gmail.com   Share this photo with your explanation. He’s been breeding and selling a line of Limias for awhile. I know he sells levamisole doses that could treat them if this is the issue. Best luck to you!

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12 minutes ago, Fish Folk said:

I’m wondering if this might be columnaris. (Same issue @Colu has identified). I’d reach out to Greg Sage at Select Aquatics — selectaquatics@gmail.com   Share this photo with your explanation. He’s been breeding and selling a line of Limias for awhile. I know he sells levamisole doses that could treat them if this is the issue. Best luck to you!

These limias are from him. I should definitely email him again. He initially thought it was ich but I have not updated him.

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17 minutes ago, Irene said:

Could be. I haven't worked with limias before, but both my mollies and platies had problems when my GH was too low, so I ended up treating them in a quarantine tank with 1 Tbsp aquarium salt per 1 gallon of water in the short term (great for external diseases like fungus and parasites) and dosing Seachem Equilibrium in the long term. The extra minerals made my plants perk up as well, so now I try to keep at least 7-10° GH.

I was surprised to see my water so soft. I think something might be up with my water softener.

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5 minutes ago, Mmiller2001 said:

My bet is columnaris/ Epistylis. All the indicators are there. All the above information is exactly what I would do. 

Keep up water changes

Adjust GH to match their preferred levels

And dose Kanaplex via food. 

I think I will do that. Do you have any experience with kanaplex disrupting the bacterial cycle or killing snails?

I just read this article on the symbiotic columnaris/Epistylis relationship - https://aquariumscience.org/index.php/10-2-4-epistylis/ The descriptions in it seemed to fit this pretty well. I introduced rabbit snails not long ago. Maybe the Epistylis snuck in the shells and took advantage of the conditions.

I think I will improve the waterflow by thinning plants too. 

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27 minutes ago, Okayestaquarist said:

I think I will do that. Do you have any experience with kanaplex disrupting the bacterial cycle or killing snails?

I just read this article on the symbiotic columnaris/Epistylis relationship - https://aquariumscience.org/index.php/10-2-4-epistylis/ The descriptions in it seemed to fit this pretty well. I introduced rabbit snails not long ago. Maybe the Epistylis snuck in the shells and took advantage of the conditions.

I think I will improve the waterflow by thinning plants too. 

You definitely want to dose orally. So grab some Seachem Focus too. By dosing orally, you shouldn't have any problems with your BB. If you dose in the water, it's going to cause a recycle and it's less effective. It's an internal infection that we need to get at, and it's way more cost effective to dose in the food.

Edited by Mmiller2001
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I personally think we are treating the result, instead of the cause. From the pictures, I can see the plants may be deficient. They've consumed all of your hardness most likely. How are you fertilizing them? I would up some water changes, assuming you have more hardness in your water. You've probably already added something to help bring it up.

From there, I would take the infected fish and put it in a quarantine tank at 1 tablespoon of salt per gallon.  I believe that this illness is taking hold because the fish have a few stress factors going on. This happens when we as aquarists get busy, and see that everything is doing "fine" for quite a while. I personally am not sure that continuing to dose the entire colony with meds is going to solve this and may just create even more stress.

I believe for fish to get through a disease, we have to eliminate the factors that brought it on. Most often this is stress. Usually it's related to their environment, water parameters, temperature. Make sure food is fresh, consider soaking food in a vitamin like vitachem perhaps. All these are usually good steps to get an entire colony back on track.

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2 minutes ago, Cory said:

I personally think we are treating the result, instead of the cause. From the pictures, I can see the plants may be deficient. They've consumed all of your hardness most likely. How are you fertilizing them? I would up some water changes, assuming you have more hardness in your water. You've probably already added something to help bring it up.

From there, I would take the infected fish and put it in a quarantine tank at 1 tablespoon of salt per gallon.  I believe that this illness is taking hold because the fish have a few stress factors going on. This happens when we as aquarists get busy, and see that everything is doing "fine" for quite a while. I personally am not sure that continuing to dose the entire colony with meds is going to solve this and may just create even more stress.

I believe for fish to get through a disease, we have to eliminate the factors that brought it on. Most often this is stress. Usually it's related to their environment, water parameters, temperature. Make sure food is fresh, consider soaking food in a vitamin like vitachem perhaps. All these are usually good steps to get an entire colony back on track.

Thanks Cory, this is helpful. I tested the hardness of my tap water to see what is going into the tank. My tap water is in the very soft category on a Tetra Strip. I think I will order some wonder shells or crushed coral. My water is high ph and kh. I had assumed that my water is hard. I am also recalling that a few months ago my wife commented on how we don't get hard water stains on plumbing like we used to.

The plants are fertilized using Easy Green once a week. If helping the fish also helped my plants that would be great. I stared at them more objectively just now and can see lots of holes in the leaves and discolorations. 

My food is pretty fresh. I switched to buying in smaller amounts so that is does not sit around as much. I feed them Xtreme spirulina flakes, bug bites, and some frozen food.

My quarantine tank is raising some platies so I will have to get a container and improvise one to try salt.

If that does not work, I might try kanaplex. As I said, it is not killing my fish so I could try less drastic changes.

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  • 4 weeks later...

My limias are improving very well now. The tank is also much prettier. The plants look healthier. Here are some things I did:

  • I renovated the tank to improve flow and increase swimming space. I removed a big piece of driftwood and moved the anubias living on it to be on the substrate, anchored their long trailing roots in the sand. I also found a few deep pockets of mulm and removed them.
  • I added Equilibrium to raise GH.
  • I redirected my Koralia away from the wall to increase flow.
  • I moved the heat up to 78.
  • I fed the fish repashy with kanaplex and focus for a week.
  • The fish looked somewhat better but some were not improving, so I set up a little quarantine talk with marine salt and took the time to catch the crustiest fish. I also put some tannin producing leaves in the quarantine.
  • I used test strips to watch parameters closely. 

So now the main tank has maybe two with any signs of illness. The fish in the quarantine are steadily getting better. I tried to get some photos showing fish that have decreasing areas of crustiness. I still have not lost any fish. I am hoping in a few weeks I will be able to safely bring some limias to trade with an LFS to reduce the size of the population and add some bright platies breeding in a ten gallon to the tank. Thanks to everyone for all the suggestions!

Main tank wide shot.jpg

Main tank.jpg

Quarantine.jpg

Healing Fish.jpg

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