Help with Cory Catfish?

[Aeroase]

Hi,
I currently have a 10 gallon tank with some green and peppered cory catfish in it.
One of the peppered cory cats looks very skinny to me compared to the others. It’s a little less active, but still more or less acting normal.
I’m worried it’s in the early stages of some kind of disease, am I just being paranoid? Or is it just skinny because it’s not getting enough food?
Water is at 0 for ammonia, nitrates and nitrites.
ph is at about 7.6 (i’m working on lowering it)
Here’s a few pictures of the cory in question.

 

[Colin_T]

Hi and welcome to the forum

The peppered Corydoras is skinny and probably has worms and maybe gill flukes. You can treat tapeworm and gill flukes with Praziquantel. Use Levamisole for round/ thread worms.

Treat Praziquantel first, after 24 hours do a 75% water change and gravel clean each day for 2 days then treat with Levamisole. 24 hours after treating with Levamisole, do a 75% water each and gravel clean each day for a couple of days. Repeat this process for 3 treatments.

You shouldn't use medications together so by treating one medication, then doing several water changes before treating with the other medication, you will be able to treat all the worms and flukes each week. You need to treat 3 times at weekly intervals to kill off any worms or flukes that hatch from eggs that are in the fish or tank.

Treat all the fish you have at the same time because if one fish has worms or flukes, they all do.

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To work out the volume of water in the tank:
measure length x width x height in cm.
divide by 1000.
= volume in litres.

When you measure the height, measure from the top of the substrate to the top of the water level.

There is a calculator/ converter in the "How To Tips" at the top of this page that will let you convert litres to gallons if you need it.

Remove carbon from the filter before treating or it will absorb the medication and stop it working.

Wipe the inside of the glass down, do a 75% water change and complete gravel clean. And clean the filter before treating.

Increase surface turbulence/ aeration when using medications because they reduce the dissolved oxygen in the water.

 

[Essjay]

ph is at about 7.6 (i’m working on lowering it)

Please do not try to alter the pH. If you are using chemicals to lower pH, these chemicals will end up inside the fish, which is not good for them; and if you have hard water the pH will only bounce back up again and swinging pH is worse for fish than a stable pH outside their normal range.
If you are using wood or peat to lower pH, this will not have much effect if you have hard water, though it will have some effect with soft water.

As long as your water hardness is within the range needed by the cories, it is OK for pH to be slightly outside their range.

 

[DoubleDutch]

What is it fed. I'd say a 10G is too small for these Coryspecies btw

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[Aeroase]

Please do not try to alter the pH. If you are using chemicals to lower pH, these chemicals will end up inside the fish, which is not good for them; and if you have hard water the pH will only bounce back up again and swinging pH is worse for fish than a stable pH outside their normal range.
If you are using wood or peat to lower pH, this will not have much effect if you have hard water, though it will have some effect with soft water.

As long as your water hardness is within the range needed by the cories, it is OK for pH to be slightly outside their range.

I have a small piece of driftwood in there. Since the tannins release slowly it doesn’t drastically change it.

 

[Aeroase]

Update:
Moved the cory to a hospital tank.
Treated the main tank and hospital tank for parasites.
The treatment has gone through, the main tank is fine but the skinny cory is still not eating. He’s not moving much at all either. Could the treatment not have worked, or will it take a bit for him to become active again?
Is it because he’s all alone and not with other cories? I moved him to the tank on his own because I didn’t want whatever parasite/disease he had to spread to other fish.

 

[Aeroase]

What is it fed. I'd say a 10G is too small for these Coryspecies btw

Verstuurd vanaf mijn SM-G925F met Tapatalk

Fed a mix of sinking bottom feeder pellets, bloodworms, and occasionally i will put a pea in there for the guppy and they eat the leftovers of it. Also, the cories will be moved to a 20 gal. soon, the 10 gal. is temporary.

 

[Colin_T]

What medication did you use?

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If one fish has a disease in a tank, all the fish will have been exposed to the disease.

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The Corydoras could be stressed from being moved and being on its own. Make sure the hospital tank has some plastic plants for shelter and a thin layer of sand on the bottom. Cover the back and sides of the tank and don't have a light above it.

Depending on what disease is affecting the fish and how far advance it was, will determine if the fish will live or die. With intestinal worms, the worms bite holes in the intestine and suck the blood out of the fish making the fish anaemic. The holes they leave in the intestine cause scarring and can lead to blood poisoning in the fish as waste products leech out of the intestine and circulate around the body. If you treat the fish before too much damage is done the fish usually recovers within a few days to a week of treatment. However, if there is too much damage done the fish will probably die.

With gill flukes the parasites bite holes in the gill filaments and cause scarring on the gills. They also suck the blood out of the fish and cause anaemia. If too much of the gill is scarred the fish have trouble breathing and die. If the fish lose too much blood (from worms or gill flukes) they die.

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Make sure the water in the hospital tank stays really clean and offer a small amount of food each day but remove any uneaten food after a couple of minutes and do a big water change after that.