Does this look like internal worms

[pointpleco]

Always a sad day when you lose a fish. Luckily for me it doesn't happen to often.
This photo shows my Albino longfin male a few hours before he died.

I noticed him looking really thin and obviously he wasn't eating because i hadn't seen him for a few days. He was on the glass close to the surface, i have plenty of air so it wasn't lack of oxygen.
Yesterday we had our 80 year heat record broken and it was 47.5 i think. But my tanks were not too hot so it also wasn't that. He has been the only fish i have lost for a long time. And the others in that tank are fine.

So i decided to quarantine him and gave him some Levamisole, but a hour or so later he died. I think if i treated him or not it would have already been to late.

Sad when he was one of my favourite fish and had been breeding well.

[bekateen]

Sorry for your loss.

Unfortunately, it's difficult to diagnose internal parasites from an external view. The only real way to be sure is to cut open the fish and look for worms in gut or other obvious signs of disease/pathology besides redness (which might simply indicate a problem, or could mean bacterial/viral infection without confirming parasite).

Also unfortunately, the treatments we use can be more stressful than the disease itself. So the fact that your fish died within an hour of treatment might indicate that the fish was so weak already that the medication killed it (even if a healthy fish could have handled it). You also need to consider the possibilities that (1) the death within one hour of treatment was coincidental and fish would have died then anyway and (2) you might have unknowingly misdosed... overdosed... the tank and killed the fish with too much meds.

Regards, Eric

[pointpleco]

Sorry for your loss.

Unfortunately, it's difficult to diagnose internal parasites from an external view. The only real way to be sure is to cut open the fish and look for worms in gut or other obvious signs of disease/pathology besides redness (which might simply indicate a problem, or could mean bacterial/viral infection without confirming parasite).

Also unfortunately, the treatments we use can be more stressful than the disease itself. So the fact that your fish died within an hour of treatment might indicate that the fish was so weak already that the medication killed it (even if a healthy fish could have handled it). You also need to consider the possibilities that (1) the death within one hour of treatment was coincidental and fish would have died then anyway and (2) you might have unknowingly misdosed... overdosed... the tank and killed the fish with too much meds.

Regards, Eric

Thanks Eric, very much appreciated.

I did cut the fish open in the stomach but couldn't find any worms. So i suppose it could be another thing that did it.

That is very true, I do think that he was so weak that the meds were to much. I only used 3 ml which is what the dose rate was for about 45 litres. So maybe he was just to weak. Either way he had a good life and left behind some nice spawns for me.

Since this i have seen a few worms in the tank he came from ( i will link some pics ). I have seen these types before in my substrate and been told they are not bad, but different opinions are always good. I siphoned them all out one was really big, about 10cms long. And a few 2 or 3 cm ones. So i treated this tank with the same levamisole medication. But at a less rate because i'm scared to put too much of it just yet.
The worms look more like a garden worm too me.

But the female thats still in there now looks a bit fat, but that could be eggs i hope and not a worm.