Swimming Problem!

[celaeno]

my 1.5 yr old female albino cory is having a swimming problem and trouble keeping its balance.

i found it stuck to the filter intake this morning when i turned the lights on and after shutting off the filter, nudged it gently, whereupon it just laid upside down on the bottom, breathing but motionless otherwise. it is still in the same condition.

what should i do?

 

[Tokis-Phoenix]

Do you use salt in the tank at all and what are your most results results for ammonia, nitrites, nitrates and ph? Does the cory appear bloated or underweight looking at all? What do you feed the cories and how much and how often on average?

 

[celaeno]

the cory is dead.

but to answer your questions...

i don't use salt in the tank. ammonia, nitrites, nitrates, and ph were all good. the cory appeared a little fat, but that's normal for female corys. i fed the corys omega one shrimp pellets (which are a little hard to soften, perhaps the cory died from choking on a pellet, or maybe a pellet was pressing against it's swim bladder? that still doesn't explain why it stopped breathing and died, though.) and small tropical flakes. i fed them twice a day.

 

[Tokis-Phoenix]

You're feeding the corys a lot of dried high protein foods, it would be better to cut down on the dried foods and feed more veg and frozen/live/fresh foods in general, with only 5 corys its also not difficult to over-feed them, so be careful on the size portions you are feeding to them too.

Constipation in fish is most commonly brought on by feeding too many dried high protein foods in particular, and left unnoticed in fish, the food in the fishes gut can start to rot or produce a lot of gas which can then put pressure on the fishes swimbladder and lead to a swimbladder infection, which can be very difficult to treat if the swimbladder is infected.


My advice would be to cut back the corys meals to just one a day for about a week or two, and to start feeding them more fresh foods like frozen daphinia and artemecia or krill etc and to feed the corys more veg too like in the form of algae wafers.
It may be good to treat the tank with an anti internal bacterial med like "anti internal bacteria" by Interpet as a precautionary measure to make sure none of the other corys have any internal infection problems going on inside them unnoticed .

 

[celaeno]

the cory in question has had breathing problems (rapid breathing) for a year before it died. i think the low ph (i didn't monitor the ph until after the ph crash incident) caused permanent damage to one or more of organs and also gills maybe. could its death be the result of the ph crash last summer?

also, i just feed the corys a shrimp pellet each and a pinch of flakes twice a day.

 

[Tokis-Phoenix]

Its posible, but i would also say that raipd breathing is a classic symptom of gill flukes, fish can carry them for a long time with no obvious external symptoms before being overcome by them- did you ever see the cory/s flicking/rubbing itself on stuff in the tank at all?

 

[celaeno]

no, i never saw it rub or flick itself against an object or surface.

 

[celaeno]

i looked at the belly of the dead female cory and noticed it seemed to be slightly bloated with air. i also noticed a pellet-sized and pellet-shaped object in its belly (are corys bellies supposed to be semi-see-through?).

this suggests that the cause of his death and swim bladder disorder was suffocation or constipation from the stuck pellet. does that seem feasible?