Flexibacter columnaris

[Rbishop]

Buc...okay to disagree....

Maga...will you be doing another fishy start up or fishless?

 

[BucJason]

The more I read about Columnaris, the more I think that this is exactly what I have in my tanks - all three of them. The description fits perfectly what I observed with my pandas. It fits the symptoms that the guppies show that die from time to time, usually after birthing stress. It fits how crappy my two remaining julii cories look, which never really recovered after that ich outbreak (or was it? They never showed any white spots). And it definitely fits the "saddle" one of my otos sports today.

I'm a bit at a loss what to do now. Isolating fish showing obvious symptoms is not really an option. I know the "keeping up water quality" part. But would you personally come with the antibiotics hammer for three tanks? Prolonged Melafix treatment? Anything else?

If you can't isolate then treat the whole tank.I would try antibiotics. Melafix doesn't help much against Columnaris. You better hurry though, because if it gets too advanced ,you don't seem to be able to cure them no matter what you do in my expierence.

 

[magakitty]

We are going to remain fishless for a while to try to let this monster die, but I am going to add some plants, and then when we start adding fish we will put in a pair of hardy danios and watch them for 2 weeks before adding any others. My quarantine tank is in the high nitrite part of the first cycle right now, but we are considering using it to observe any new arrivals for a while before introducing them to the population. because we are almost 3 weeks into the initial cycle, we hesitate to break it completely down and start over, because we do have some beneficial bacteria growth. This is the same reason we didn't want to add antibiotic now that the fish are all gone. We were going to go to the LFS in the morning (it was closed by the time I had done enough research to figure out what was going on) and get the medication, but by morning it was too late.
Ulan - apparently there are many different strands of columnaris and the one we got was acute and particualrly virulant. Some don't kill near as fast as the strand we got in our tank. Within 36 hour all of our fish were dead. They exhibited all of the signs, including the fin erosion