I hope someone out there can give me some insight on this... my wife and I are new to acquariums, but ours has been set up and running since sometime in January. We have a 6 gallon tank. We had 3 tetras and 2 dwarf gouramis, still have the 3 tetras and down to 1 gourami. We just woke up one day and one of them had died.
The survivor I later noticed had like a white cottony substance trailing from his tailfin, and a little bit in other places... I did my best to try and diagnose this from websites I found online and thought it to be a fungus of some sort. I bought a product called fungus eliminator I think and it didn't seem to do much after a week of treatment. Went back to the pet shop and they suggested it was bacterial and sold me Melafix. Again, no real change in the appearance or behavior. Everything I read online about the behavior of the fish pointed to columnaris disease, so I searched for a product that dealt with that. Somewhere online I found it to say to use triple sulfa something or other, so I tried that. I did about a 35-40% water change as the carbon has been out of the filter for almost 2 weeks+ and put the new medication. All of a sudden the Gourami couldn't seem to stay anchored. Kept trying to stay down low, but kept seeming to rise without wanting to. Still swam around seemingly ok, but now he just lays on the bottom. He's done that for the better part of 2 days. I keep waking up thinking he will be dead, but sure enough he is just laying there, still breathing. I'm wondering if there is anything that I can do?
If someone could help that would be greatly appreciated but I'm anticipating we are going to have another casualty
The survivor I later noticed had like a white cottony substance trailing from his tailfin, and a little bit in other places... I did my best to try and diagnose this from websites I found online and thought it to be a fungus of some sort. I bought a product called fungus eliminator I think and it didn't seem to do much after a week of treatment. Went back to the pet shop and they suggested it was bacterial and sold me Melafix. Again, no real change in the appearance or behavior. Everything I read online about the behavior of the fish pointed to columnaris disease, so I searched for a product that dealt with that. Somewhere online I found it to say to use triple sulfa something or other, so I tried that. I did about a 35-40% water change as the carbon has been out of the filter for almost 2 weeks+ and put the new medication. All of a sudden the Gourami couldn't seem to stay anchored. Kept trying to stay down low, but kept seeming to rise without wanting to. Still swam around seemingly ok, but now he just lays on the bottom. He's done that for the better part of 2 days. I keep waking up thinking he will be dead, but sure enough he is just laying there, still breathing. I'm wondering if there is anything that I can do?
If someone could help that would be greatly appreciated but I'm anticipating we are going to have another casualty
