No matter how hard you try to keep your fish happy by doing regular water changes and providing your pets with what they need, illnesses and injuries will occur.
The main causes of illness and injury are:
Fish bullying each other – chasing each other around the tank causing stress, nipping at and tearing their fins
Hurting themselves – grazing themselves on a tank ornament or bumping into the tank wall, catching themselves on rough gravel or sand.
Poor water quality – such as high levels of ammonia, high levels of nitrite and so on. High ammonia levels mean less oxygen for your fish and also starves the good bacteria in your filter too, reducing their efficiency and adding to the poor quality further.
Eating too much – some fish are very greedy and will simply eat too much. If their diet is not varied, then this can also lead to a bloated stomach and constipation, which is signaled by red poop trailing from their body.
Not eating enough – If you have greedy fish, it is possible that weaker slower fish may lose out, this can make them weak and susceptible to illnesses.
New fish introduced – bringing in new diseases
Filter not working
As can be seen, illnesses can result, despite your best efforts.
Some of these illnesses can be cured, but others will result in death whatever you do.
Nevertheless, whatever the outcome you will want to try and save your fish.
How to know something is wrong:
The first thing you need to do is ‘notice’ that something is actually wrong. To do this, you need to spend at least 5 minutes every day observing your fish.
- Count them – check they are all there, if any look to be missing, search for them – a dead fish rotting in your tank will only cause problems for the other fish.
- Check their colours – Stressed fish, look more pale, or lose their colour altogether, this is a good sign that something is wrong.
- Check all your fishes’ movements – are they swimming normally? Or are they very slow, swimming in one spot? Are they darting around erratically, or maybe spending more time sitting at the bottom of the tank. They may even be spending more time at the top of the tank gasping for air. Check if they are hiding and keeping away from other fish, or being picked on?
- Are they supporting their bodies, or do they look limp?
- Check for fungus on their bodies, spots, or bleeding.
- Notice their eyes, are they bright, or dull?
- Are they all eating? Unwell fish can stop eating for a whole week. Or your fish may eat the food then spit it out, because they do not like it.
All these things will alert you to the fact that they are ill and may even give you an indication of what the problem is, although in some cases, they may have more than one problem.
Types of medication
There are many types of medication available for all sorts of fish diseases. Some medication deal with bacterial infections, others deal with fungus problems, injuries, diseases etc.
Why you should set up a hospital tank
Once you are aware that there is a problem, you need to act fast. Diseases can spread quickly to other fish, so it is necessary to isolate your fish, as soon as possible and treat it before any other fish fall ill.
If you have different types of creatures in your main aquarium, the last thing you want to do is treat your whole aquarium with medication which could help some, but harm others. Some fish medications should not be used on crustacean or catfish. Some medications are also unsafe for plants and could also kill the good bacteria in your filter, which would be disastrous for your tank.
If you medicate your tank it may also be difficult to remove the medication, without the use of a carbon filter.
Having a hospital tank means you can take the affected fish away from the other fish and treat them without harming or affecting anything else.
A hospital tank can be much smaller than your actual tank. 24 litres is a good size, but you could go to 12 litres if necessary.
-You will also need a small heater, small filter, as well as light and internal temperature gauge
-You will also need methylene blue and other medication as necessary
-Aquarium salt
-A large glass jar or bowl, and fish net
-Water testing kit
You should not use substrate such as gravel, sand or live plants – soft plastic plants are a better option, so that the medication can be washed off them easily at the end of a treatment.
Your hospital tank should already be set up and ready with clean conditioned water, to accept any ill fish. It may seem like a waste of space to have an empty tank of water sitting in your home waiting for your fish to get ill, so why not use your hospital tank as a conditioned water store for water changes in the meantime.
This means when you do a water change in your main aquarium, you top it up with the water waiting in the hospital tank, then replenish the water with new conditioned water. After all, the older the water is in your tank the better it is for your fish.
Alternatively, you could run the smaller tank with only one or two fish in, so it doesn’t look strange sitting empty, which can later be swapped with an ill fish if it should fall ill. A good example, would be a betta fish.
This way you could keep the two tanks running with the same parameters. In other words, running at the same temperatures, pH, etc, so that the fish didn’t have to be acclimatised again going to another tank.
Medicating your fish
There are two ways of medicating your fish:
- Using a salt dip or methylene blue dip
- Hospitalising them with medication
You should not use two medications mixed together in a tank, but often fish suffer from more than one illness at a time, so using the dip method is an easy way of dealing with this problem.
The primary cause of many illnesses is internal bacterial, often caused by poor water quality, particularly if you have set up a new tank and it has not been cycled properly.
To treat the underlying bacterial infection, place the ill fish in a small container (such as a large jar or equivalent), containing water from your main aquarium, add a couple of drops of methylene blue and a couple of grains of aquarium salt. Leave the fish in there for about half an hour. Have another container ready containing water from your main aquarium ready to rinse of the methylene blue.
After half an hour, place the ill fish in the next container. After another half hour, place the fish into your hospital tank with the medication to treat their actual ailment.
