The fish are dropping one by one...

Pheintz

Oh Great Giver Of Food From Above
Sep 9, 2006
62
0
0
Oregon, USA
It all started with one of my Bolivian Rams suddenly lying on the bottom of the tank one morning. Still breathing, but unable to swim upright. Isolated her, upped the temp, added some salt, made sure the bubbler was going good. She never recovered and died 2 days later.

Then.. a couple days later, one of my rainbows developed a white patch near it's tail. Looked like columnaris. He started hanging at the top of the water, breathing heavily. Isolated him and then noticed one of my green tiger barbs started floating sideways around the tank. Netted him and put him in with the rainbow. By this time I am stumped thinking some highly contagious disease is sweeping through my tank.

Last night I saw the 2nd Bolivian Ram suddenly flop over and float around the tank.

Aside from the white patch on the rainbow, no other infected fish showed outward signs of disease besides the fact that they would float on their side and breath heavily.

I did a vacuming and w/c. Parameters are still ammonia 0, nitrites 0, and nitrates 0 (I have plants). Unless my AP Master Kit is malfuctioning (it worked during the cycling as I was able to read each level I was at in the process.)the only changes that happened recently were a temp drop from 82 to 78 one cold night and a ph drop from 7.2 to 6.8 from the driftwood.

If it is a particularly nasty strain of internal/external columnaris I guess all I can do is watch, wait, and do what I can for them.
 
Did they eat normally right up until the point where they started acting funny? I had sort of the same problem happen with some cories and then a couple Angels. They were eating fine and then, boom, started acting weird and then a couple hours to a couple days later they each started dying. I think it ended up being an internal parasite of some sort, because the Angels were experiencing white stringy poo. I think the cories came from the LFS store with it and when they died, the Angels picked at their bodies.

Have you recently added any new fish?
 
Had started the salt treatment day before yesterday. Am up to 1tbsp per 5 right now and am going to buy more salt today.

Last fish I added was one rainbow a couple weeks ago. I suppose he could have brought something with him as I am fairly certain he is the one who developed the white patch.

Around that time I also added the pair of killies and the red tailed black shark but they are all looking fine and being active.
 
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