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help needed ASAP whitespot!


helen2289

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my 65 litre tank currently has white spot. i only saw it tonight and it is quite bad. i know what to do for whitespot but i am going away early on thursday morning until saturday. i have treated the tank for whitespot tonight

any tips on what else i can do? should i do a water change?

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my 65 litre tank currently has white spot. i only saw it tonight and it is quite bad. i know what to do for whitespot but i am going away early on thursday morning until saturday. i have treated the tank for whitespot tonight

any tips on what else i can do? should i do a water change?

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1) Currently i have cories and danios in the tank

2) i used white spot cure (thats what it has on the bottle but its the blue stuff- cant remember its name!)

3) the tank was at 26 but i have raised it to 28 tonight

Thanks Helen! That's all good stuff to know. Danios are incredibly tough little blighters so they will withstand both the heat and the meds just fine. I'm not so sure about the cories - perhaps someone else can advise on that?

I believe the active ingredient in 'White Spot Cure' is malachite green, which disappears spontaneously in the presence of organic material. The instructions usually say to keep adding so many drops a day per litre, over several consecutive days. If that is the kind of instruction on the bottle then I would suggest that you definitely wouldn't do a water change after treating for a couple of days as this would just dilute the medication.

If the cories can handle the heat, you could put the temperature up even another couple of degrees but I would take two precautions:

- Ensure you have lots of extra air going into the tank - if you can lower your water level and get extra surface movement from your filter output, that would be ideal.

- Only use the very high temps for the time you are around to supervise the tank. Drop it back down to 28 degrees before you go away. That way you are available to take action if your fish show signs of stress.

I have only had one outbreak of white spot and that was some years ago. I treated with a combination of heat and meds over an extended period and successfully treated the clown loaches and various barbs without loss. Unfortunately I lost all my otocinculus. Apparently they would have withstood either the meds or the heat but using both was just too much stress for them (so I was told at the time).

Good luck and let us know how you get on!

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Helen,

I recommend this article on whitespot to everyone. It is involved but excellent, covers everything. It also exposes all the annoying myths that just don't seem to die, that mean people get stuck with recurrent infections and never actually get to the root of the problem.

http://www.skepticalaquarist.com/docs/health/ich.shtml

Whitespot is very annoying but if you understand it you are half way there :)

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Helen,

I recommend this article on whitespot to everyone. It is involved but excellent, covers everything. It also exposes all the annoying myths that just don't seem to die, that mean people get stuck with recurrent infections and never actually get to the root of the problem.

http://www.skepticalaquarist.com/docs/health/ich.shtml

Whitespot is very annoying but if you understand it you are half way there :)

Thanks for the link, Stella. I just read the article and some of the recommended links and it helped to refresh my understanding of ich and its treatments. :) It's a very thorough and sensibly written article and was definitely worth the time to read again.

So, applying the article to helen's problem, we would advise her to:

  • Do a thorough gravel vac
  • Remove any carbon from the filter but otherwise keep the filter running as normal
  • Use the White Spot Cure at the dose and frequency recommended on the label and follow the recommended water-change regime
  • Black out the tank (the effectiveness of Malachite Green can be reduced by sunlight)
  • Raise the temperature of the tank to speed up the life cycle of the parasite while under treatment
  • Increase the surface agitation to ensure there is plenty of oxygen in the water
  • Observe the fish carefully for signs of stress (the combination of meds and higher temps can stress some fish more than others - and it looks like cories might be one of the more susceptible fish)
  • Continue treatment for the period recommended on the bottle of White spot Cure, or possibly longer if she has any reason to doubt that the treatment has been effective.

Have I missed anything?

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