First of all I'm sorry for my English, I'm not a native speaker.
I am very concerned for one of the gibbiceps (Marzio) I bought 16 days ago.
A little background: after a 5-10 minutes-drive I put them in a quarantine tank (50L, gravelit, a piece of wood, some stones, everything previously boiled. Some snails and one anubias). Since previously it was not active, I put water from my display tank (500L, already containing one 1.5y-gibbiceps and one 5y-pardalis) and added some filter media that I normally keep in my DT' filter in order to activate a tank when needed.
After 2-3 days one of them had 3 white spots that really looked like ich so I immediately did a 15% water change (from my DT) and raised the temperature to 30.5 deg. They looked comfortable and ate normally. After 5 days of high temp we had to go to my parents' for a couple of days for Easter holidays (after another partial water change). They were all right and their bellies were round. I left them with the automatic feeder on. As I came back (8 days of high temp) no sign of ich but one of them was bloated. I decreased the temp to 26.5 and examined him better. His belly was bloated and reddish and his head was bloated as well. The other looked round on the belly but he was constantly under the wood so I was not able to look at him properly. I immediately suspected dropsy but not sure. My boyfriend has previously experienced dropsy many years ago in other newbought fishes but never in loricariids and he never saw such a bloating on the head (you can see it in the pic, since I am not able to explain it any better) and searching on the net I found nothing similar.
But I have to say he is not lethargic at all. Even before medication he moved and ate normally. 5 days are gone and I see no exterior improvents but every time I feed him he eagerly comes out and starts looking for food for at least 15 minutes.
Today I noticed that the other one which is normally under the wood for most of the time started chasing Marzio as he "invaded" his zone. And he continued to chase him, making me decide to separate them.
Here is a pic from today (terrible quality though).
(even though it doesn't look so)I've been doing 10-15% water change every 2-3 days always with my DT water.
I plan to wait other 2-4 days then stop mynocicline (which my father said it is pretty harsh even on humans) and start metronidazole. He told me they don't interfere each other so they could be used together, but I'm afraid they would be hard on the kidneys since fishes doses are not that studied and known.
I hope I was clear enough. Thanks to everyone that will answer and read everything.