Sickly clown loach

[Coz0308]

Hi ,

I'm new to this forum - so hello!

I hope someone can help me, we've had clown loaches for years we have a pair that I've had for 8 years and a pair of little loaches we've had for a year. One of the older loaches has been acting really strangely, he keeps swimming around at the top of the tank instead of the bottom, seems to have got thinner and has lost some of his colour on patches - it looks like the colour has gone transparent - I suspect that our pictus catfish has been bothering him and might has cused this?.

can anyone offer any help as to what might be up with him and what we could do to make him better?

thanks

coz

[chefkeith]

It could be a bacterial problem.

Do you know what the water parameters are. Such as Nitrates and gH from the tap and from the tank?

How often do you do water changes and what's the water change %?

Is the substrate clean? There should be no waste building up in the substrate.


How much water flow is in the tank?

[Coz0308]

hiya - thanks for your help.

Substate is pretty clean - we have a suction thing which cleans it as you do water cahnges and very little debris comes out.

we change the water every 3 weeks or so and about 30 percent.

not sure about the water flow exactly - it has a large fluval filter on all the time - which is cleaned when we do water changes.

don't know about nitrate and ph - I'll have to dig out the test kit.

what do you think I should do to help him recover?

thanks for your help!