Loaches Online Forum

My newest addition, Bozo, died today.

No indications before today.

Went to disneyland over the weekend, left in vacation feeders and fed bloodworms before i left. Was chipper as can be before i left. No visible Ich for at least a week.

Today i found him on his side gasping. about 30 mins later i saw him do three tight loops and expire.

The only indicator i could possibly have mentioned is that he seemed to be a bit on the red side...? his dorsal area from snout to tail seemed a bit reddish. Might this have been a bacterial infection?

Before he kicked he was a little pasty, his mouth was wide open, obviously having oxygen issues, but there was nothing done to the water to cause any shock, and none of the other fish seem to be affected.

(insert long drawn out sigh here)

why do these clowns hate me? there is seriously nothing else i can do for these little buggers. (80C, 7.0pH, R.O. D.I. water, 1 month Quarantine...????????)

oh well, i guess i will try again to get Pontious a new friend in a few weeks. Will a 1 TBLSP salt per gallon salt bath kill my new snails?

You mean 80F, right?

If you're only going to be gone a weekend, I would just feed them normally and then not bother setting up vacation feeders. That just increases the chances that something goes wrong, such as too much food being dumped into the tank. Hopefully, you didn't use any of those dissolving vacation feeders.

I don't understand why people have problems keeping clown loaches. I've had mine for several years and they seem pretty tough.

I would never use salt. I use RO water exclusively and have UV on all my tanks. I don't feed anything fancy. Mostly Hikari sinking carnivore pellets with the occasional thawed shrimp or zucchini. Because I'm quite busy, I don't do water changes as often as I should. Some of the clowns I purchased weren't that healthy. One was obviously skinny but responded well to antibiotics. Several were bought at a tiny size and grown up.

I'm sorry to hear about your loach.

Snails can handle small amounts of salt but 1 Tablespoon per gallon would probably be too much for them to survive.

I'll just throw out some thoughts here...I don't know if you already took these precautions or not.

Did you check your water parameters upon your return? Was there ammonia or nitrite present? Were nitrates very high? If the automatic feeder overfed while you were gone and there was an ammonia spike it could have intensified any illness the fish may have been already dealing with. Just trying to figure it out...

Another thought. How long did you treat for ich before stopping? If it was less than 2 weeks it might have come back and killed him, appearing in the gills where it would be more lethal and also invisible to you.

Hopefully things will go better next time.

Tammy