Dropsy & Fin Rot - Dwarf Gouramies

[STRiDER]

Please Help

Tank size: 310 litres
pH: 7.8
ammonia: 0
nitrite: 0
nitrate: 3
kH: 105
gH: 140
tank temp: 26 deg C

Fish Symptoms (include full description including lesion, color, location, fish behavior):

2 x Dwarf Gourami with Dropsy
2 x Dwarf Gourami with Fin Rot

Volume and Frequency of water changes: 25 % weekly

Chemical Additives or Media in your tank: Micro Nutrients for plant growth
Canister Filter with various media (Floss, Sponge, Ceramic, Softening Resin)

Tank inhabitants:
8 x Dwarf Gourami (New)
5 x Ottocinclus (4 New)
2 x Bristlenose Catfish (New)
4 x Panda Corydoris (New)
4 x Bronze Corydoris
6 x Swordtail
18 x Neon Tetra
18 x Zebra Danio

Recent additions to your tank (living or decoration): See above list. New fish added a week ago after two weeks in quarantine. They showed no ill effects before adding to my tank.
Apart from the four sick Gouramies I cannot see any other fish being ill. All are feeding and acting normally. Last water change was today (25%).

Tank age is 4 months. Previous problems includes high PH (8.5) recently stabilised between 7.8 and 8.0.

Exposure to chemicals: No medicine used before. Only additives is water conditioner with water changes and micro nutrient plant mix.

Fin rot was first noticed yesterday. It included some white growth on the tail fins. The white growth has dissapeared today. The fish still acts normally.

The dropsy was only noticed today (so it happened very quickly and basically overnight) These are two different Gouramies from the two with Fin Rot. The dropsy is already fairly advanced and the Gouramies are not remaining upright any more.
I have quarantined them immediately. Will only be able to get medication tomorrow from LFS (if they have any).

Question: Are these diseases contagious and / or treatable.
Any other inputs are welcome.
I do not know where these infections come from really. The supplier is extremely trustworthy and two weeks of quarantine showed no ill effects.

Thanks in advance...
Andre

 

[zoekin8yg]

Im surprised that your ammonia is zero after adding so many fish at th same time. The dropsy sadly is very very unlikely to go away and those fish are likely to pass away. If you have any anti internal bacteria meds try those in quarentine. The fin rot should be treatable, make sure they are in clean water, again not with the other fish and treat them with an anti fin rot med, if you dont have one go to your lfs and read the bottles, personally my first stop would be some melafix (at half the dose for gouramis) but not everyone would use that. I would personally euthanise the dropsy cases as there is little you can do, but thats your choice.

 

[Tokis-Phoenix]

You'll need an anti internal bacterial med for the dropsy and an anti external bacterial and fungal med for the finrot.
Dropsy is quite a hard desease to treat, once all the scales have pineconed the chances of successfully treating the fish are quite slim, but it is not an imposible desease to treat. Dropsy is primarily brought about by either internal bacterial infection or constipation or both. So you need a good internal bacterial med for the dropsy (i would recommend "Anti internal bacteria" by Interpet) and should change the fishes diet to one based more on veg (de-shelled, chopped and cooked up pea's, algae wafers, blanched and chopped up spinache, heart of cucumber etc) and less long dried or high protein foods- frozen daphinia is also good for fishes digestion.
Thankfully though its generally not a very infectious condition.
I would recommend Pimafix for the finrot- finrot is usually either fungal or bacterial in origin, but Pimafix treats both of these so is a good med for finrot. If not Pimafix, i would recommend "anti fungus and finrot" by Interpet for the finrot.
I don't think you should have changed your ph (why did you change it), all of your fish are quite adaptable to such ph's and messing with ph of tanks can cause it to fluctuate depending on what you use to change it, which can be quite stressful for fish and bring about desease in them. What is the ph in the quarentine tank you kept the fish in? How did you go about changing the ph of the tank?

 

[STRiDER]

Thanks for inputs.

Here's some more info:

Adding of large amount of fish : I relocated a lot of fish from my tank when I added the new fish. The filter was therefore up to the job of handling the new arrivals.

PH : With my PH at 8.5 my tetras was struggling quite a bit and coupled with very high hardness I felt it necessary to lower the PH. The process was extremely slow (over about two months). I use a water softening resin in my filter that lowered the general and carbonate hardness over time. This led to the PH dropping slowly by itself to between 7.8 and 8.0. It is important to note that a lot of thinking and planning went into this as I fully understand that a fluctuating PH is far worse than a high PH.

PH in quarantine : The fish were quarantined at my supplier for two weeks. PH was 7.5. Therefore the fish were introduced to higher PH water in my tank.

Diet : My current feeding routine as follows : Enriched Flake food every second day (Normal flakes mixed with small amounts of chlorella and spirulina flakes)
Hichari micro wafers every other day.
Frozen blood worm once a week.
Algae Tablet once a day. (Tetra Tabimin)
I should maybe add that for the first couple days the Gouramies was very shy and did not really feed much. This has improved over the last two days although I am not sure whether they are getting enough food.

 

[fisharepeopletoo]

My experience is very limited, but I will tell you that I had no luck with Melafix for fin rot. I recently lost one of my dwarf gouramies to fin rot, despite him being quarantined immediately and treated with melafix. I wish you the best of luck with the pimafex though.