Panda Cory with possible Lymphocystis

Jon_C

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I've got 10 juvenile Panda Corys. One of them is smaller than the rest and is now showing a single white spot on its site. The rest of my fish aren't showing any signs. Any advice would be appreciated. Should I quarantine? If it is lymphocystis it doesn't sound like there's anything I can do but wait for it to possibly clear up. Sorry for the blurry pictures. The first picture shows the other side with no spots.

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It's not lymphocystis.

It looks like excess mucous, probably covering a small wound. Clean water and salt should fix it.

The fish is really skinny and should be dewormed. See section 3 of the following link for deworming fish. You can use salt and dewormer at the same time.

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WHAT TO DO NOW.
Wipe the inside of the glass down with a clean fish sponge. This removes the biofilm on the glass and the biofilm will contain lots of harmful bacteria, fungus, protozoans and various other microscopic life forms.

Do a 75% water change and gravel clean the substrate. The water change and gravel cleaning will reduce the number of disease organisms in the water and provide a cleaner environment for the fish to recover in. It also removes a lot of the gunk and this means any medication can work on treating the fish instead of being wasted killing the pathogens in the gunk.
Make sure any new water is free of chlorine/ chloramine before it is added to the tank.

Clean the filter if it hasn't been done in the last 2 weeks. However, if the filter is less than 6 weeks old, do not clean it. Wash the filter materials/ media in a bucket of tank water and re-use the media. Tip the bucket of dirty water on the garden/ lawn. Cleaning the filter means less gunk and cleaner water with fewer pathogens so any medication (if needed) will work more effectively on the fish.

Increase surface turbulence/ aeration to maximise the dissolved oxygen in the water.

Add some salt, (see directions below).

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SALT
You can add rock salt (often sold as aquarium salt), swimming pool salt, or any non iodised salt (sodium chloride) to the aquarium at the dose rate of 1 heaped tablespoon per 20 litres (5 gallons) of water. If there is no improvement after 48 hours you can double that dose rate so there is 2 heaped tablespoons of salt per 20 litres.

Keep the salt level like this for 1-2 weeks. If there's no improvement after a week with salt, stop using it and post more pictures.

The salt will not affect the beneficial filter bacteria, fish, plants, shrimp or snails.

After you use salt and the fish have recovered, you do a 10% water change each day for a week using only fresh water that has been dechlorinated. Then do a 20% water change each day for a week. Then you can do bigger water changes after that. This dilutes the salt out of the tank slowly so it doesn't harm the fish.

If you do water changes while using salt, you need to treat the new water with salt before adding it to the tank. This will keep the salt level stable in the tank and minimise stress on the fish.

When you first add salt, add the salt to a small bucket of tank water and dissolve the salt. Then slowly pour the salt water into the tank near the filter outlet. Add the salt over a couple of minutes.
 
Unfortunately, when I started the tank cleaning process yesterday I found that the fish had died. I went ahead and completed the cleaning. Thank you again for the advise Colin.
 
I would deworm the tank just to make sure the rest are free of worms.
 

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