The Puffer Forum

It is just a general starting point, I did not mean to sound like I was suggesting anything hard and fast. Yes, the needs of various types of fish vary greatly.

I have had very good luck with some of the starter bacteria.

Keep checking water quality (ammonia, nitrates, PH) daily. Do a 25% water change every other day -- more if the levels are going up, say 33% daily. 50% or more can be very stressful for fish, so only do that if you are seeing mid to high levels of ammonia or similar very bad signs. You're looking fo...

About four months, but it felt like much longer. We were very attached. Talking to some friends who are biologists and have done some work with fish, their best guess is that he already had the eggs inside him when we got him. After a while they just hatched and started working their way out, and he...

I am very sad to say Rasputin passed last night. My wife and I are devastated. He was a fighter, but in the end even with the medicine it seems there were just too many of the worms inside him -- he passed several intestinal worms and ended up concave and would not eat, and the other worms were emer...

I dosed him twice in total, the second time after a ~25% water change. He looked worse, so I prepared another 5 gallons, pulled him out, and did an almost complete water change on his tank and put the carbon back in the filter to try and remove whatever was irritating him. It was the same meds -- Ju...

I have switched to feeding only once a day as suggested. He is still extremely lethargic and honestly looks as bad as he ever has, maybe worse. I used the gravel vac to get the worm he passed out of the tank the other day, but the red things in his gills are still there and look no better. There are...

Another quick update: more active now, and the trail of fecal matter (or worm) is now more than an inch long and extremely thick, where before it was just a small "bump".

He is lethargic and sitting on the bottom of the tank again, though he will move around if I get close. He then startles, "wakes up", and will swim around and beg for a bit before settling again. He ate some shrimp this morning but would not eat at all tonight. There appears to be some fec...

The worms, if that's what they are (it does look like a mass of worms) are still very much connected to him and close to his body, so sadly I can't get them out of there as he will shy away from my hand and the vac, and I don't want to stress him any more than the whole thing already is. From what I...

I started with Jungle brand "Tank Buddies" anti-parasite tablets, which were all I could get my hands on at this time of night around here, though the active ingredient list looks good to me and includes Praziquantel. Put the first tab in an hour or two ago and he is still looking fine, no...

Okay, I'm seeing the red string-like things coming out of one gill again. They are about 1/3rd the thickness of a bloodworm, bright red, maybe two to three cm long. Are these parasites? If so what kind, and how should I treat them? I've been looking for pictures online and found nothing that looks a...

Are you still seeing a red stringy thing coming from the gills? Gill flukes?? Everything I've read says gill flukes are too small to be seen with the naked eye, and the things I saw were about the size of blood worms. I haven't seen any last night or today, just one the day before. I'm starting to ...

Retested levels three times and got 0 ammonia and <.3mg/l nitrates (lowest my kit can test for). I must've misread the chart before, because I've done nothing different to the tank. BIO filter should be able to keep up even with this messy fish, since it is a 75 gallon rated filter (BIO-Wheel 350) o...

Hard numbers: PH between 7.5 and 8 N02- less than .3mg/l NH3/NH4+ .25mg/l or less Hardness, can't find my scale card but it should be fine and certainly shouldn't have changed substantially recently. Salinity 1.015 Tank has been cycled for more than 2 months now. It was cycled fish in (I know, terri...