IP or Picky eater?

Oh no! Sick fish?! Come here and see if someone can help!
Forum rules
Read this before posting!!

Since this board has been up, we have found there are several questions that routinely get asked in order to help diagnose problems. If you can have that information to begin with in your post, we'll be able to help right away (if we can!) without having to wait for you to post the info we need.

1) Your water parameters - pH, Ammonia, Nitrite, Nitrates and salinity (if appropriate). This is by far the most important information you can provide! Do not answer this with "Fine" "Perfect" "ok", that tells us nothing. We need hard numbers.

2) Tank size and a list of ALL inhabitants. Include algae eaters, plecos, everything. We need to know what you have and how big the tank is.

3) Feeding, water change schedule and a list of all products you are using or have added to the tank (examples: Cycle, Amquel, salt, etc)

4) What changes you've made in the tank in the last week or so. Sometimes its the little things that make all the difference.

5) How long the aquarium has been set up, and how did you cycle it? If you don't know what cycling is read this: Fishless Cycling Article and familiarize yourself with all the information. Yes. All of it.

We want to help, and providing this information will go a LONG way to getting a diagnosis and hopeful cure that much faster.

While you wait for assistance:
One of the easiest and best ways to help your fish feel better is clean water! If you are already on a regular water change schedule (50% weekly is recommended) a good step to making your fish more comfortable while waiting for diagnosis/suggestions is to do a large water change immediately. Feel free to repeat daily or as often as you can, clean water is always a good thing! Use of Amquel or Prime as a dechlor may help with any ammonia or nitrite issues, and is highly recommended.

Note - if you do not normally do large water changes, doing a sudden, large water change could shock your fish by suddenly changing their established water chemistry. Clean water is still your first goal, so in this case, do several smaller (10%) water changes over the next day or two before starting any large ones.
Post Reply
FlyingHellFish
Puffer Fry
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Nov 27, 2011 11:12 am
Location (country): Canada

IP or Picky eater?

Post by FlyingHellFish »

1. ph 7.8, A= 0, Nitrite = 0 Nitrate = 5 - 10 ppm, Seachem Stability (No longer used) Seeded media from my 1 year old Fluval 6 gallon.
2. Fluval Edge 12 gallon, 7 - 10 Cherry Shrimps (I recently moved my 6 amano back to my Fluval 6 gallon) , tons of live plants. All 12 gallon for the two.
3. 25% Sat, 25% Sun, recently did a 50% when the problem started.
4. Beside moving my 6 amano shrimp , none. I had to move them because their tank went through a mini cycle , I deep cleaned TOO much on that tank. 7 cherry introduce a few days after I got the two puffers.
5. 1 month - by itself, just cycling and setting up live plants. 2 weeks with puffers.

Dwarf Puffers, both female, both round and fatty when I got them. Here the problem, one of them refused to eat his frozen blood worm, had problems swallowing one and would just spit out the empty shell. Not too uncommon but, she not eating at all yesterday, forums told me about IP, freaked out, brought her Seachem Metro. I was told to start treatment quickly.

Today, I brought some live brine shrimp, she totally went nuts for them. She hungry but is picky about the blood worms, no idea why. Both their poo is dark brown, not stringy. I did notice the fatter one had a dark brown poo that was clear in some places.

Now, I started treatment with Metro, just dose the recommended dose for water, soak a bit of brine shrimp in it (she totally loved the shrimp), and now I got a batch of frozen blood worms soaking in the medicine too.




........... tell me I'm paranoid.

My tank:
Image

Here are the two divas, the one with the eating problem is the top one, that is her RIGHT after I spent 15 mins wiggling countless worms in her face. No way am I going to give up on something so cute. They ignore the shrimps, sometimes pokes them.
Image
User avatar
goldielocke76
Fahaka Puffer
Posts: 878
Joined: Sun Aug 21, 2011 7:19 pm
Location (country): California, USA

Re: IP or Picky eater?

Post by goldielocke76 »

LoL I am not sure about IPs, (I will let more people more expert than myself chime in) but I do know that it's always a good rule of thumb to treat for it by soaking food, but I have only 1 female DP, and let me tell you, she stresses me out more than my other two puffers combined because she's such a gosh darned picky eater. I love her to beyond and back, but sometimes.....

Mine won't even eat snails. All she will eat is blood worms. All I can say is that if you find a food, stick to it. Because they are notoriously picky eaters.
5.5g: Pond snails
5.5g: Red Cherry Shrimp and Rams
10g: PZ the Pee Wee (DP), Ghost shrimp, Otos x3
36g: Luau the F8, Zebra nerites x8, sometimes a herd of ghost shrimp for food
60g: Perches the starry blenny, 1 watchman goby Snaps the l.c. hermit, 2 emerald crabs, 1 red crab, 2 turbos, 7 asteas, 2 nerites, 2 clown gobies and 2 firefish gobies (upgrading to a 90 gallon reef)

RIP Yoshi, you are dearly missed <3
FlyingHellFish
Puffer Fry
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Nov 27, 2011 11:12 am
Location (country): Canada

Re: IP or Picky eater?

Post by FlyingHellFish »

Tell me about it, the claws come out when there food, oh how I miss the tug of war they used to do. It must be the cutest factor, the brine shrimp were the same cost as my puffers. Snails are by far the least type of food they're interested in, they just poke it to death or lose interest once it stops moving. Must be captive breed puffers I have.

It's super hard taking a close up picture of her, she curiosity until I take out my iphone 4, she hates that thing. It doesn't really take fast moving picture greats either.
Post Reply