Clown not well, any ideas?
 

Hi, my one clowns has become very short of breath and its gills are staying open with red showing. I'm afraid it may be some kind of infection. It wont eat and has become anti social. In the pic if you can zoom in it's the one on the lower right. All water parameters are within acceptable ranges, though the salinity is 31ppt which is toward the high side. I read lowering it could increase the oxygen level and I'm uncertain if that would help as all the other fish are doing fine. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Hey, I am sorry to hear that, I think ICH gives red irritated gills.

I don't know if the high salinity is a good idea but the clowns lives where anemones live and anemones live in shallower water near the coast and thus in lagoons as well. That means that in nature they would encounter different water conditions as flow and ebb brings all kinds of shifting environmental conditions with it. So clowns are not exactly the most most most delicate of deep water fishes or anything. I would think ICH unless you just got this fish. If it was nettet in the shop or got ammonia burn in the bag, it could be that but otherwise, look into ICH.

I'll find you some info, hmmm, well it takes some time to read though this page, but read through whatever the search engine gives you, it is a really good link with cures, treatment methods, symptoms and just about everything::

I would immediately prepare to treat it for ICH, this page has answers about medication, just use search on the condition you wanna cure:

http://www.wetwebmedia.com/clnfshdisart.htm

But yeah, I guess ICH, the parasite goes into the gill easier than getting in under the skin tissues. ICH sits on the outside of the fish but I recall something with it also being possible to feed it the medicin internally, not sure, if you can target feed it with ICH medicine by using something like FOCUS to bind the meds to food, you can try isolating it to give it rest and target feed it in something like this if you don't own a QT or Hospital tank:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Aquarium-Fi...-/273635621223

I thought Ich was identified by white spots on the outside, non are visible. sorry about the picture quality, I had to compress it. How could I send you a clearer pic?? It's 4.62 meg.

I seriously doubt that this is Cryptocaryon (Ich). If a Cryptocaryon infection is progressed enough to make a fish breathe heavy and act abnormal you would definitely see the typical white spots come and go.
Also, scientific research has shown that Cryptocaryon has no preference to where it settles on the fish and that it is generally uniformly distributed all over the fish.
However, on fish with partial immunity, the spots are more likely fond on the fins than on the rest of the body. This is due to the fact that the fins are less well supplied with blood and therefore the immune response there is less effective (for the same reason Lymphocystis usually shows up first on the fin edges).

Heavy breathing and inflamed gills point to a parasite that preferably infects the gills. This could be gill flukes or Amyloodinium (Velvet). Though, with clownfish, the usual suspects would be Brooklynella or Trichodina. Both usually start in the gills and spread from there over the body. Same is the case with Amyloodinium. Brook will at later stages cause a whitish slime on the body that will form strings that make it look like the fish's skin is peeling off. Another sign of Brook (and to a lesser part the other two) is when the fish clamps its fins. Amyloodinium will appear as a golden brown dusting of the skin (best seen against the light).
All of those are generally accompanied by a secondary bacterial infection.

The first thing you should do is administer an antibiotic to get the inflammation under control. Septra (available from Thomas Labs as Fish Sulpha Forte) is in my experience the most effective. The dose I usually use is 1 tablet per 50 liters (or one per 10 gallons if you use that tank size as a hospital tank.)
That should get in most cases get the breathing back to normal within 12 hours.
At that point you might want to give the fish a formalin dip (against Brooklynella and Trichodina) and then move it to a clean (=uninfected) tank. This should be repeated every day or at least every other day.
I would also strongly recommend lowering the salinity in the treatment tank to 1.016 to reduce stress and improve the oxygen uptake of the water.

If gill flukes are the prime suspects - fish spreads its opercula (=gill covers) wide open - then you may want to dose the tank with PraziPro. Unfortunately, the skimmer has to be off during PraziPro treatment and the medication reduces the available oxygen. So make sure to have good water movement!

If Amyloodinium is suspected you may also want to dose copper. There are better treatments against Amyloodinium, but they are more specific and I would only recommend them if you are absolutely sure it is Amyloodinium. The benefit of copper is in this case that it treats a number of parasites, but unfortunately not Brooklynella and Trichodina (against those you need formalin).

I see ThRoewer actually knows a huge amount of detailed stuff about this. It might be a good idea to lower salinity or drop an air stone in there, it might help it alittle.

.... I do believe that I have read somewhere that Gill Curl in itself is enough to produce these symptoms and also to invite things such as ICH to settle faster in the gill tissue.

I would be concerned that this is simply Gill Curl, a condition caused by the stress of being moved from clear sided container to clear sided container or other stress factors such as tank too small etc.

The fish would do better if allowed to settle in a permanent home so if Prazipro for flukes is the most logical place to start, there is no need to use antibiotics preventively or force the fish to go through several treatments.

Greetings ThRoewer and Small Heavens. Thank you for advice and some direction. I'm such a moron I actually trusted a student at Aquarium Services to calibrate my new refractometer. It being an important gauge I didn't want to risk it myself. Some online reading said distilled water should read zero PPT. Is this true? I tested some and The distilled water read 3 PPT. 1st thing I'm going to do is learn how to properly calibrate the refractometer myself. What good is a reference tool if it's not accurate?

What the refractometer reads for distilled water depends on with what standard solution it was calibrated with and how linear it reads - assuming it has a functioning temperature compensation and was calibrated at 20°C.

If you use the refractometer mostly to check in the ocean salinity range then it is best to calibrate it with a 35ppt standard. In this case the reading may be off a bit when checking RO or distilled water.

If you use your refractometer mostly to get the salinity right for hyposalinity treatment then you should definitely calibrate it with RO/DI or distilled water.

With a really good refractometer this may not matter a lot if any at all. But with those sold in the aquarium trade I would be more careful an calibrate them for the range I intend to use it in.

Sent from my XT1254 using Tapatalk

A couple of questions please?
 

Good evening ThRoewer. As I don't have a hospital tank I can only start with isolating the poor fella in a breeding net box hence I can't medicate him independently.
I have some PimaFix, Ick-X and SeaChem Prime conditioner but haven't used anything yet.

Is there a way to post or send you a few seconds MP4 video? The file size is too large for this page and I don't see MP4 format as an option. Email or maybe Facebook? It would show his appearance and rapid breathing much more clearly.

If my refractometer is already reading 3 - 4 ppt with distilled water and my tank water is reading 31 - 32 ppt does it mean the actual salinity is 35 - 36?

You should definitely invest in a quarantine tank. A 10 gallon QT is ideal for small fish (up to 4").

I would suggest to set up a free Youtube account and upload the videos there. Then you can use the "embedded" code to post it here.

It doesn't necessarily work that way and depends on how linear your refractometer is.
I suggest you get a bottle of refractometer calibration fluid: Amazon.com - 35ppt calibration fluid

Sick Clown
 

Hi ThRoewer, I hope this link works.

https://youtu.be/HisCGwyAkiE

That fish looks pretty bad.
It is pretty unlikely that this is Ich.
While Velvet can't be excluded, it should have killed the fish by now and other fish would certainly affected as well.
Even Brook should have progressed more by now.
Flukes could be a possibility.
Whatever it is, the behavior of the fish makes it pretty clear that its gills are seriously inflamed

You definitely need a hospital tank to isolate and treat the fish.
First you should give the fish an antibiotic treatment to combat the gill inflammation. My recommendation would be Septra Forte (160 mg Trimethoprim / 800 mg Sulfamethoxazole), one tablet on a 10 gallon tank (or 1 tablet per 50 liter if you use a larger tank). You should see improvement within a day.

Next you may give the fish a freshwater bath (Formalin would be better in general, but I wouldn't use formalin on fish that have already breathing issues.)

Depending on the condition of the fish after that treatment I would give it next a PraziPro treatment to combat a possible flukes infection.

To narrow it further down it would help to know the history of the fish and the tank:
how long you have the fish?
had the fish other issues before?
what are the other fish in the tank and how is their health?
what was the last wet item added before the symptoms started?

sick clown