medicate a tank with pregnant fish???

[Magnum Man42 156]

initially this was a live bearer question, but it could be a problem with egg layers too, so I placed it here...

so I have treated for internal parasites, and noticed fry shortly after... now in my dump tank, I have wild type swords breeding, but also have some Juvenal wild sail fin molly's, that appear to have fin rot, maybe velvet, or just a lot of damage... this is a 65 gallon, with a mix of fish, including a pair of florida flag fish ( egg layers ) I really worry about someone else getting what ever the small mollys have, so have been looking at treatments ( suggestions ) and if I can treat the whole tank, without killing fry, or screw up my bred females... thoughts???
btw... these fish have been like this for a month, ( I was hoping it was just damage ), they ( 2 of them ) don't seem to be getting better, or any worse, and none of the other fish have shown signs of getting it???

 

[Magnum Man42 156]

this one of the 2... highly active, hard to get pictures

 

[GaryE2]

@emeraldking ?

It's so hard to tell anything about this question when the glass is dirty. What's on the glass, what's on the fish?

 

[Magnum Man42 156]

sorry, the glass is really not that dirty, the picture is pretty zoomed... this is part of a group of fish from Florida... the seller lists literally 100's of males females or mixed, so I may have come from a pond, or large outside tank, and may be as close to "wild type" as I can really get... just another issue associated with these fish... it may have just been beaten up, depending on how they were tanked, before being shipped...

I have some more wild type swords coming, I may decide to go with those instead of the sail fin molly idea... I'm trying another 2 mature pair from Dan's, again today, and if that doesn't work out well, the swords are going to take over...

these wild type Xiphophorus hellerii, are listed as getting to 5 - 5.5 inches long, with swords matching their body length

 

[GaryE2]

If we overlook the big white spots as glass things, they are beaten up and hungry looking. I wouldn't be adding to that tank til I'd resolved that. I also wouldn't mix swordtails from different localities - the young will end up the same as each other, and not necessarily as the interesting and distinctive local forms that are the parents.

I've medicated with gravid livebearers. You really have no choice, as they're so often gravid!

There are rumours that I haven't tracked down that copper based meds can make swordtails infertile, but beyond that I haven't heard any major horror stories of things going wrong with medication. I don't use copper meds anyway, so I've never researched that. I've seen a whole lot more go wrong with unmedicated diseases.

I'd wait for emerald's experience.

When I was bingeing on helleri species each location had its own tank. To get the larger forms to be large, they needed no crowding, no other males larger than them and lots of space.

 

[Gertrudae]

I have always had bad experiences when mixing livebearers from different sources without a very slow and careful acclimatisation process over several weeks. Adult livebearers seem unable to cope with new germs in different environments. The young fish are quite resilient, but the adults die like flies.
You've got a few different fish recently, haven't you?

 

[Magnum Man42 156]

I have some more Rio Atoyac coming ( same as my others, they were back in stock ), as well as the larger ones, which will go in the other tank, so they will be kept apart...

those small damaged moly's are starting to look better, again, a month later, and no signs like that in any other fish...

as hard as my well water is, I'm inclined to start blending RO in, maybe switch back and forth, every other water change???

 

[emeraldking21 72]

Mollies are vey sensitive to fungus and ich. Once one has it, you should be cautious about the other mollies in the same tank.

 

[TwoTankAmin36]

Baby fish can be more at risk from diseases etc. than adults. For example, adults who survive ich develop and immunity to it. This is not a long term thing but is does last for some time. We can often see this in a tank with ich where some fish just do not get it. However, fry in such a tank would have no such immunity.

I can also relate to you a nasty story involving a few folks I know and have met at events. All of us wee breeding zebra placos. One was a gent in TX who was getting regular spawns but soon after the fry were booted from the cave as free swimmers they were dying. He could not figure out why. The other person was a woman much more experienced and had connections at an area University which had a dept. of involving the ability to diagnose, research and work with fish diseases etc. SHe had the fellow in TX send here some of the fry who she gave to here friend in the lab.

It turned out there was oodinum aka velvet in the tank. It was almost impossible to spot on the fry and it was killing them. This disease can be treated pretty much the same way as Ich. Since you mentioned velvet, I figured this might be relevant.

 

[GaryE2]

Hmm, it could be. I find it interesting that in the era when I started with tanks, velvet was a serious issue in the hobby. Ich, velvet and fungus meds were in every store that sold fish. I suspect a lot of that had to do with the lack of water changes back then creating ideal conditions for this parasite, but it has never gone away. It lives in many tanks in low concentrations, and tends to only become a serious issue when it has the opportunity to infest the skin of a host.

A hardwater fish in too soft water or under serious stress is a classic victim. Chilling can be the stress. Velvet is an opportunist.

There is another related parasite doing the rounds (maybe many of them), but if it were that, @Magnum Man 's fish would be long dead. About 10 years back my livebearers were hit with something velvet like, that killed all my mollies and many of my platy and swordtail groups. It was very persistent and hard to eradicate, but it wasn't chronic. It killed.

It's hard to treat velvet, but meds exist. In this situation, if it is velvet related and hasn't spread, you could remove the affected fish to a hospital tank, dark because velvet photosynethesizes and hit the fish with a salt and acriflavene treatment. It might be worth a try.

EDit in" Does anyone here have experience with Chilonodella?

 

[TwoTankAmin36]

From what I have read regarding treating for velvet what I found interesting had to do with their photosynthesizing. It was suggested that interrupting the normal light cycle could be helpful in treating for it. Depending on the source, some suggested that one should blackout a tank to treat velvet while others recommended doing the opposite and leaving lights on continuously.

 

[GaryE2]

Velvet is a big thing for annual killie keepers. Nothobranchius get is easily. I have my first Notho in a decade, and they developed it in 2 out 5 breeding tanks. Some fish are really susceptible to it, especially around peat, in my experience.

Black outs are what I used, along with a proprietary med (Tetra Ick Guard, which contains velvet killing acriflavene as well as Ich killers).