PlanetCatfish.com

howdy

i had a really bad experince the other day it seems that every time i go to drill (as i am in the air guard) my wife kills one of my fish !!! well not really but it just seems to happen when i come back i have either a dead fish or one on its last legs actually i have only lost 3 in the last 3 months so its not that bad but i have a question i had two iridescent sharks and they have been upstanding members of the community well as they were doing that airobatic thing that they do one of them caught his left eye on some of my bogwood yeah i know it sounded bad it didnt look pretty either well i metafixed the tank for about a week and often stress coat it healed yeah!! but he died last night well i wasnt really sure why he died so i did a fishy autopsy his gills were black and one of them had a white leision type growth on it non of the rest of my tank i have a 90 gallon are having any problems was this some type of secondary infection leftover from the eye ??

tank conditions
nitrates tolerable
ammonia ok almost none exhistant
nitrates low in fact my tank is slighty acidic but tolerable

if i got nitrites and nitratetes mixed up you know what i mean did a water change today and everyone else is happy

1 tiger shovelnose 10"
lima shovenose 6"
several ciclides
a couple of loaches
a snail
pictus cat
blue channel cat
needlenose gar
1 lonlely iridescent shark

any help is needed a tank crash would be very bad!!!!!!!!!

just a reply i found out that the shark with the damaged eye was not the one who died so now its even more of a mystery can anyone help me if this is a parasite it could do alot of damage and i dont need that!!

can anyone help me with this question i havent had any deaths since this but if its a problem i need to know

Some cichlides are natural enemies of catfish. A cichlide who hates catfish may focus attacks on the eyes of the catfish. Long and careful observation (with you in the dark, perhaps) may yield more clues as to which fish is causing the problems if it's a fish at all.

Also, if your drills are not extended periods of being away (more than 2 weeks), do a water change before you go and leave the fish alone without feeding. This will keep the water clean and will prevent over-feeding "accidents." If they are well fed and not small, they should be able to fast for up to a couple weeks.

As for the lesions and blackgills, I can't say. If the fish was already decomposing, such an autopsy without the aid of a microscope may yield no useful information. IME, fish do not survive eye-plucks very well. The best thing you could try if a fish loses an eye might be to put a fair amount of neosporin on the wound. Never-the-less, eye-plucks have been mostly fatal, in my experience. Sorry.

Hope this helps a bit.

a couple months ago there was a pangasius catfish at Petsmart that had both its eyes missing. They kept it in the tank for a least a month. It looked like it was doing realy well. I finnaly decided I was going buy it but it was gone when I went for it. I was quite impressed how healthy it looked despite not having eyes. But I guess thats not usually the case.

Not quite sure what an iridescent shark is but here are my thoughts for what they're worth anyway..

Given that a fish managed to injury itself and then its companion died, I'm led to believe that they are/were both suffering from something nasty indeed. Fish very rarely (in my experience) have accidents and therefore consider that the injured fish was already afflicted by something else.

The gill diagnosis is very difficult to make without seeing them, but my guesses would include a localised lymphocysist or fungus of some sort. Given, however, you say you have a snail, at the top of my list would be a digenetic fluke infestation. These have a life-cycle that pass from snails to fish and then back again. Sanguinicola, for example, can cause gill necrosis and could be the cause for the odd gill colouration. Where did you get the snail from? Did fish only start dieing in your tank after its introduction?

Did you do your water testing before or after your water change. Your 90 gallon is a pretty full tank of fish that can get big and/or are big and maybe bad water quality is some of the blame. I imagine based on your inventory list that you probably feed feeder fish. Are you sure one of them is not dead and rotting somewhere? That can sometimes lead to strange outbreaks.
None the less I hope you plan on buying a tank at least 10 times the size of the one you have to put your cats and gars in once they reach adulthood. I really don't know why you would be keeping so many large fish in such a small tank. When stocking a tank it should be based on the adult size of fish not the actual size of the fish. You went a bit overboard.

If you are not having problems with water quality now I bet you will when your fish get bigger.

tank conditions
nitrates tolerable
ammonia ok almost none exhistant
nitrates low in fact my tank is slighty acidic but tolerable

Sorry but this doesn't help much can we have the readings in ppm or mg/l ect.

How long after the shark died was the autopsy done?