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I've just bagged up and binned my 4 Pim Pictus. I'll try to keep this short, but any suggestions as to what went wrong would be appreciated. I've had the 4 (all 3.5 - 4" long) of them for approx 2 months in my 320l tank with assorted bits and bobs, mostly mediumish (ie non-bitesize) community fish and a few smaller oddballs, at well under the stocking ratio. pH is about 7.2, ammonia and nitrite reading zero (on a new test kit, so thats not out of date), nitrate low also. Enough hiding places to go round, a varied diet and no harrassment from tank mates that i ever noticed. All seemed well, until Saturday, four days ago, when i noticed the dreaded Ich beginning to show on them, but nothing else in the tank was affected. I'd just added a pair of medium angels from my other tank so i assumed it had been transferred over and began treating for it with the King British WS03 whitespot remedy, underdosing slightly. The pictus spent the next 3 days swimming up and down the bubble stream from my airstone, whilst getting steadily worse and passing a mild case of whitespot around the tank. Then, today, i came home from work and found one of them very dead, two more gasping their last and the final one in a pretty poor shape and looking ready to follow his chums to the great river in the sky. So, having euthanised the lot and flounced around in a general sulk, i decided to ask you lads for help.

My best guess is that having caught it, they got stressed about it which made it worse. Then the treatment stressed them further, doing more harm than good, and finally they bought the farm. There appears to be ruptures under the skin, at the base of the fins and whiskers particularly. Are pictus more susceptible to Ich than other fish, i'd always thought them to be quite hardy? Do they not take well to treatment?

Thanks in advance for any answers. If you need further info to give an opinion, i'll try to provide it.

I said short didn't I? Sorry!

The whitespot organism is present in a lot of fish tanks but only affects fish when they become stressed or weak, so you might not have transferred it but might have transferred a cause of stress - ie the angels.

I have had good results in the past with WS3 as long as the temp is raised but some scaleless cats like pictus can react badly to treatments & the whitespot can be hard to shift - i think i'm right in saying the treatment is against the organism in the free-swimming stage - so not actually when you see the spots on the fish - it is therefore a case of a course of treatment over a number of days with w/changes in between.

I've found pictus to be less hardly than other cats like for example, synos, doradids, woodcats, bagrids. They can be fine but when things go wrong they can go downhill very quickly