Clowny Loach Freckle Update

[Icewall42]

So, for that past week or two, I've had 2.5 cups of salt in my 72 gallon. The TDS is hanging steady at about 2800-3000ppm. Thankfully, the freckles on my clowns are beginning to fade away! I haven't seen any signs of distress over the salt,either, and I currently have 6 clowns, 1 Botia Helodes (I named him Wiggles!), 1 Kuhli, 4 Botia Modesta. All seem to be healthy, active, and in decent shape. There's a mild case of fin rot on the clowns, but I think the salt has also been helping that to heal up.

I'm beginning to think that all my disease problems and loach death issues are related to my removing salt in the first place. I read somewhere that loaches are too sensitive to salt to keep a regular amount of salt in their tanks, so I stopped giving my loaches salt for a while. I've had no end of trouble until I decided to drip salt back into the tank.

I think this tank will always keep a moderate amount of salt in it from now on. I'm not sure yet of the dose, but I know now that I'll never do without it again.

[chefkeith]

Thanks for the update. I'm glad the salt is working and cleaning up the spots. Back when I did it the spots started to disappear after about 10 days. It's amazing how clean they look after a few weeks in the salt bath. The salt may also wipe out any unknown external parasites, which is a double bonus.

(Personally, I don't trust any parasite/ich meds. This salt bath works best IMO. )

A few of my clowns had black spot outbreaks when I moved them to my new river tank. Only the clowns that I didn't acclimate to the new water got the black spots. The clowns that I acclimated in a bucket didn't get the black spots. I don't think there is much more to the black spots than the sudden change.

I hope the black spots are no longer problematic for your fish. A few black spots here and there are really no big deal. I don't plan on doing a salt bath for the few clowns that I have with the spots. They are just blemishes. The majority of my clowns look great.

Keeping salt in the water at all times is not the greatest solution either. It makes future salt treatments less effective. Some Bacteria and Parasitic strains may build up tolerances to such levels or may even become immune to the salt.

Remember to keep a close eye on your tap water. I think I mentioned before that that cities like yours use multiple wells for their processing plants. When they switch wells, the TDS difference could be significant enough to cause some osmotic shock, which could lead to all kinds of problems or outbreaks.

[Icewall42]

I plan on keeping an eye on the tap to prevent future outbreaks. The spots are still numerous, but they are fading out to grey, so I think they are well on their way to looking great again.

I'm aware that salt in the tank isn't recommended, but that's just not advice I wish to follow. I've had a minor amount of salt in all my aquariums for many years and almost never had disease outbreaks. As soon as I stopped adding the extra salt, I had fish dead overnight--twice this happened in one month. I lost fish that were 2-6 years old. If such things keep happening, then salt resistance or any medication, for that matter, is irrelevant. I'm sorry I've just had too many tragedies linked to this.

[chefkeith]

Understandable.

Unexplainable die offs really stink.

Mike V has been having mystery problems also. It is very puzzling for everyone. I hope he finds a solution soon.

Just a few questions-
What kind of substrate do you use? When was the last time you changed the substrate? Did you ever check your rocks to see if they were leaching anything?

The reason I ask about substrates is that Tinman has linked many of his past fish deaths to due to substrates. He goes bare bottom on most of his tanks now.

[Tinman]

Yes , I keep fish , not gravel . I do this to reduce contaminents and places for them in my tanks. I am also on a old sea bed here in Kansas for a water shed so my years have taught me no salt here as naturally it is already previlent but this is a vast forum and my experiences don't mimic the rest of the world nor water conditions. We all grow reading this forum and I still am unchanged on many things from the years of keeping fish like you are with your salt and I have changed on some others because of this site. We all learn to play our own hands and I am glad you are finding a solution to your spots Keep us posted

[mikev]

Mike V has been having mystery problems also. It is very puzzling for everyone. I hope he finds a solution soon.

Thanks, Keith.

I __think__ I found the solution. RO does work, there was only one death since it has been installed, and I roughly understand how the delayed effect was possible (substrate is likely at fault). I hope 2 more 20%-25% W/C's will eliminate the danger. I'm reasonably sure about the cause now too, with what Chris said and people on RC confirmed, Copper is either the cause or a major contributing factor...

Could this possibly be the same thing as with Icewall?

Philadelphia is as old as NY, probably full of rotten telephone wires and other copper sources. Might be worthwhile looking into the water report and see what is says about Cu, if it happens of the same order as here, this may be it.

As for salt.... I don't think this is the right way...

[Icewall42]

Copper? That's a possibility. I've always thought that all my problems might be linked to the tap water. I really need to pull up the water reports for Philly, now that I have an idea what to look for.

As for the substrate... I changed it some time earlier this year, from gravel to sand. I used Quikrete commercial grade sand, which is pretty fine and even grained. I don't know what sort of problems it might be causing, since sudden, selective death seems too strange an occurrence for the sand to be at fault. The idea about copper might make sense since aren't some loaches naturally more sensitive than others? Also, the two rocks I had in the tank were pulled out some time ago. There wasn't any improvement with the freckles until I introduced the salt bath. I'm not sure if the rocks are actually leeching--I have yet to set that up and test that hypothesis.

Tinman, thanks for giving me your thoughts. I know people will disagree with my practices, and in the end, I may not be exactly right, at least not always right for the fish I'm caring for. But I was raised to maintain my tanks this way, and I've always had good luck with my loaches (except for the whole disappearing acts!), so much so that my oldest clowny is 11 years old, fat, colorful, and his usual ornery self. I know I haven't done some things exactly right. But I raised these fish in a certain way, and I'm too worried right now to change my old practices until I for sure know what killed my loaches. If it turns out to be copper content in the water (and somethow I think New York might be similar to Philly), then the salt will likely get stepped back to be almost nonexistent (but still a hint of it in the water).

But until that time, I'm too worried about my fish to change anything.

I'll keep updating. Thanks for all the information. I do get plenty of good advice from LOL! Salt is just a bit of a sticking point.

[mikev]

@Copper: there may be a local source too, if this is an old house. I've discovered something today, see the R/O thread.

@Salt: what worked for you in one place, may not work so well in another: water chemistry, for example, is different. I'm still researching my problem, but it seems I found that a couple of things I did, previously seen as safe, contributed to deaths. One of them, incidentally, was Prime, which I'm not totally throwing out, but will be more careful with from now on.

hth

[doglover_50]

One thing I don't see mentioned, though Keith implies it, is not absolute level of salt in your tank, but *change.* The way you wrote it, it sounds like you decided to get salt out, you did it immediately, and fish died the next day. Perhaps I misread, but if that was the case, I think an interpretation of that data would be it was not the lack of salt that killed your fish, but rather a shock from having salt to none/near none. This theoretically makes sense in light of the negative impact of sudden changes in temp or pH or alkalinity or water hardness or whatever--my take on these things is that fish can slowly adapt to a lot, but sudden changes can be bad news.

I keep reef tanks and spend a LOT of time on RC--it's a good place to go for water quality issues. Just FYI, in reef tanks we don't test TDS, because it is in the 10's or 100's of thousands, so high as to be meaningless. However, we *do* absolutely need high quality ro/di system, as your TDS of water going in needs to be virtually zero. Otherwise, phosphates coming in act as fertilizer for algae blooms that are bad news. I believe copper would more likely come from pipes in the house, NOT your water source. Reef tank types often keep copper test kits. If you wanted, buy one and test your water--any larger saltwater LFS would have it.

[Icewall42]

I may have to use something to test the copper if the water reports are inconclusive. I live in an apartment, so the condition of the pipes here is unknown to me.

And no, when I stopped adding salt, I didn't clean out all the water and make a sudden change. I was adding a very miniscule amount to begin with, maybe a couple table spoons in 55-100 gallon tanks, give or take however much the salt built up between water changes. When I stopped, I simply stopped adding salt, and let my weekly or bi-weekly water changes slowly take the salt out. There was nothing immediately changed.

I'm sorry, I really should have clarified--the fish died overnight maybe a couple weeks or more after I stopped the salt additions.

[mikev]

It appears that I have to scrap copper as the source of my problems. It is, however, remains fully possible that it is the cause on your end, with $5 cost of the testkit, it is probably worthwhile doing.

[Icewall42]

I still think it's viable here, since this apartment building is really quite old and has only recently been renovated. We live on the old side of the building. I don't know if they changed or cleaned the pipes when they renovated the units.

[stabile007]

Well keep in mind where we live was formerly a warehouse so it didn't have the extensive plumbing system we have now that being said the water mains and the main piping could have copper in it.