Help With Cotton Or White Spot

[jamesmacc]

Hey guys, my Malawi tank is now about 14 months old, one of my fire fish ice got pop eye and a few others have small bottom looking patches, I dosed the tank with treatment and woke up to find all the fish gasping at the surface and the fire fish dead, is it the medicine or would it be the fact it would struggle to breath?
The treatment was inter pet anti white spot
The tank is 385 j with two large external filters
Cheers
James

Fish seem happy, a bit of flashing on rocks though but they are still breeding and have a few holding, I thought they would only mate when water conditions are perfect, can it be if they have white and cotton spots
Can you think of a good cure?

 

[techen]

Sounds like your water stats are way off, Post test results.

 

[jamesmacc]

Will test them now, fish only started gasping at surface when medicine was added, they dont usualy go near the top

 

[jamesmacc]

Ammonia 0 , nitrite 0 nitrate 20 ppm , I do a 50 percet water change once a week with seachem prime, sand is stirred every few water changes to release any gas or dirt, fish fed once daily with new life spectrum, there are about 25 fish in the tank .
I lost about 10 last year from a disease which I was told on here most likely came from the breeder and a few people had the same problem

 

[the_lock_man]

Will test them now, fish only started gasping at surface when medicine was added, they dont usualy go near the top

If the infection looks like cotton, the it isn't whitespot - that looks like grains of salt or sugar sat on top of the fish.

Part of the problem is that whitespot is a parasitic infection, whilst cotton-like growths are either bacterial or fungal, so what you've done is much like trying to cure a headache with indigestion tablets. What makes it worse is that fish treatments are generally poisonous. They rely on giving the issue a big enough dose of poison to kill it without killing the fish. But it does make the fish feel grotty, but at least they feel better because they're original problem starts to go away. In your case, you've made a stressed fish even more stressed without that relief.

IIRC, my whitespot treatment tells me to increase aeration, as the medication binds some of the oxygen in the water. Assuming your Malawi tank is overstocked (as a Malawi tank should be), this makes the lack of oxygen even worse, and would account for the gasping).