# Platies with something



## Tsquare (Feb 9, 2007)

A couple of my Platies are darting and scraping against plant leaves etc. I"m sure they have some kind of parasite or fish lice. They otherwise seem fine. How do I get rid if the problem short of getting rid of the fish?
Gene


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## eklikewhoa (Jul 24, 2006)

Sounds like ICH, do a seach for either Ich or Ick which should turn up with some good results.


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## ruki (Jul 4, 2006)

So how have the platties been regarding eating plants?

I have some cute dwarf platties and they are one of the few fish that will eat Wolffia. They don't like duckweed (Lemna minor) though. Do these guys eat other plants?


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## trenac (Jul 16, 2004)

First before you began treatment you need to make sure of what your fish are suffering from. Take a look at these sites to help you determine that... http://animal-world.com/encyclo/fresh/information/Diseases.htm

http://www.fishyfarmacy.com/

http://www.uniquaria.com/articles/dfd.html


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## furballi (Feb 2, 2007)

You'll see white spots on the fish if it is infected with ICH. The nominal cycle for white spot is around 3 to 4 days at 75F or higher. My cardinals will occasionally dart around and scrape against the plants. They will also run up to the tank to grab some O2. These acts are usually initiated by one fish, then the rest will take turn. I also have neons in this tank, but they don't play these games.

I'd turn on the light and see if you can see any abnormal growth on the fish. Leave the fish in the tank if it is clean and has an appetite.


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## Tsquare (Feb 9, 2007)

Thanks everyone. I'm sure it isn't Ich as I know what that looks like and the only time i had a problem with it was when they got chilled. I will take a look at the links to see if I can I dentify the problem.
It's only a problem with 2 of 7 Platies and no problems with the Cories either.
Gene


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## furballi (Feb 2, 2007)

Salt is usually a safe treatment when you cannot diagnose an illness. Start with one teaspoon per 10 gal, and gradually build up to a TOTAL concentration of three teaspoons per 10 gal over three days. If the fish shows no improvement, then bump up to five over the next two days. If they are okay at the end of one week, then gradually lower the concentration over the next three days with 50% water changes.


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## Tsquare (Feb 9, 2007)

What effect will that much salt have on my plants?
Gene


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## furballi (Feb 2, 2007)

Most plants can handle up to 3 teaspoons per 10 gal. Extended exposure to higher salt concentration will damage some plants. All will re-grow if you don't keep the tank in this condition for more than 7 to 10 days.


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## Mad Dog (Mar 3, 2007)

Oh boy....I know I shouldn't do this but oh well, I am going to do it anyways.



> Salt is usually a safe treatment when you cannot diagnose an illness.


In many ways, this statement can be true, but only if you are having a hard time making an exact diagnosis between a few illnesses/issues that you have narrowed things down to AND all of those possibilities are normally treated or treatable with salt. For example, some people have a hard time distinguishing between velvet and Ich, but since treatments for both are similar and salt is an option, then I would go 'blind' and add salt. The reason that I wouldn't just guess that salt is going to be OK is for two reasons: 1.) While a lot of illnesses and diseases can be treated with salt, there are many which require Epsom salt (magnesium sulfate MgSO4) versus common salt (sodium chloride, NaCl) and thus treatment may be less effective. 2.) Your fish may be suffering from an open wound which could be irritated by salt or you have fish (e.g. scaleless fish, tetras) and plants which cannot handle the amount of salt that Furballi suggests using...which is based upon the assumption that his last statement was a typo and he intended to say one _tablespoon_ of salt per 10 gallons versus teaspoons; which I double checked from some of his last posts just to be sure that I was not remembering things wrong. While I agree that three tablespoons of salt may be an OK treatment in some situations, mainly fish-only tanks, there is still a lot of risks to that IMO and not something I would do entirely blind.

One of the biggest issues here is that unless you are a vet, a biologist, ichthyologist, or something along those lines, we are basically making semi-educated guesses when diagnosing issues we find on our fish. While a case of Ich is usually pretty self-explanatory and straight forward in how to diagnose it, other less common or less visible problems do exist such as bacterial or fungal infections, among others, which are hard to diagnose. When I say Ich is 'usually' easy to spot, there are times when a fish can be highly infected with it and no visible white spots are there...most commonly when it is concentrated in a fish's gills. I would also add that Ich is harder to spot on some fish, obviously white fish or fish which are naturally spotted (which is more common in saltwater fish i think) or even when it is just starting to appear. Sometimes very bad cases of ich can also look like velvet, which is rare because the fish either dies first, or we are paying enough attention to catch it before it gets that far. That said, I might take a better look at your platties to see if Ich is absolutely not a possibility.



> I'm sure it isn't Ich as I know what that looks like and the only time i had a problem with it was when they got chilled


While I know that I am probably taking this out of context....just in case, I wanted to bring up that even though your fish did not get 'chilled' recently, this does not reduce the odds that your fish do not have Ich right now. Any sort of stress can lead to a weakened immune system and hence Ich is more able to host on your fish (in this case, the part of the immune system which needs to be affected would be the stress/slime coat for the most part, if not always).



> I'm sure it isn't Ich as I know what that looks like


One way to rule out Ich is by thinking back to the last time you had it (or first time in your case), and determine if you have since added any new fish, inverts, plants, foreign water, etc... IF it has been more than a couple weeks (or a month for absolute sure) since you last saw Ich on a fish, and you have not added any new fish (without quarantine for 2 to 4 weeks in another tank) or other livestock, LFS water, water from any other tank, or generally any possibly contaminated thing to your tank, then it is very likely that your tank is Ich-free at the moment. If you have added anything in the past month, then all bets are off on that idea. As a suggestion, setting up a quarantine tank is going to save you a TON of hassles later on since you wont have to put plants and other fish at risk during a treatment.



> I'd turn on the light and see if you can see any abnormal growth on the fish. Leave the fish in the tank if it is clean and has an appetite.


Again, I am sure that I am taking this out of context as well, but I think it leads into a good point in that Ich is a contagious parasite, which means that once one fish has it, more are sure to follow. Also, because it is contagious, removing only the infected fish while leaving others is only going to help that one fish, not the rest. In this case, you should always treat the_ entire_ tank and all of its occupants together. Otherwise, you can remove all of the fish from your planted tank, treat them in a hospital/q-tank, and not return them to the planted tank for three weeks to a month. This works because without a host, Ich will die off completely in a tank over that amount of time. Onve gone though, add the fish and then quarantine *any* new purchases that came out of someone else's tank.

In fact, I would say that if you ever find yourself in a situation in which you have more than one fish in a tank with the same symptoms, which you are in now, always always always treat the whole tank since this suggests that it is contagious and would then remain in the tank even if you took out only the affected fish. If fungal or bacterial in nature, I also dont think that the trick I explained above with taking all of the fish out of a main tank and waiting for the problem to die off would work on a non-ich type issue....or at least that is a reasonable assumption which allows you to err on the side of caution.


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## Tsquare (Feb 9, 2007)

I am just getting back to fish keeping after a 20 year hiatus and the last time I had Ich was that long ago. There are 7 Platies 3 Cories and 1 BN Pleco in there. Plants are Ludwiga, Water Sprite, Swords, Dwarf Sag, a few unknown Crypts and Algea. I think I will treat with salt but is it 3 tsp or 3 Tbls? If the Algea dies it dies. One of the 2 Platies showing symtoms is black and no sign of the usual white spots. Also I will filter with a diatom filter which should remove free swimming Ich. Are any of the plants vulnerable to the salt?


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## furballi (Feb 2, 2007)

Tsquare said:


> I am just getting back to fish keeping after a 20 year hiatus and the last time I had Ich was that long ago. There are 7 Platies 3 Cories and 1 BN Pleco in there. Plants are Ludwiga, Water Sprite, Swords, Dwarf Sag, a few unknown Crypts and Algea. I think I will treat with salt but is it 3 tsp or 3 Tbls? If the Algea dies it dies. One of the 2 Platies showing symtoms is black and no sign of the usual white spots. Also I will filter with a diatom filter which should remove free swimming Ich. Are any of the plants vulnerable to the salt?


3 teaspoons per 10 gal may be a tad strong for some plants. I've pushed up to 9 teaspoons per 10 gal without any long term damage to anubias, swords, val, and java fern.


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## Mad Dog (Mar 3, 2007)

I am not the plant expert here, not even close to thinking about standing next to a plant expert to be really honest. However, from what I have read on the forum here, and from discussions with other members, I got the impression that crypts must be pretty sensitive plants and at least one member here swears that the lower amounts of salt we are talking about here would kill them. Again, I am pretty much a newbie as far as plants go so I would hold on for a while in order to get some more reliable feedback from someone who knows what they are talking about.

I have this fish disease/illness encyclopedia-like book with a ton of great pictures in it. It is also relatively new (copyright is 2004) so I think it is at least relatively up-to-date. Anyways, I skimmed through every picture and description within the parasite chapter and to be honest, it did not list a single external parasite which cannot be seen directly, or becomes visible because it leaves a tell-tale sign like a reddened or inflamed area. That said, I am really starting to wonder if your best bet is really to assume that this is Ich and start adding salt to your tank. Are there any other symptoms or signs on your fish? Do your fish produce waste which appears 'normal to you...meaning not a weird color, stringy, or slimey/mucous-like? Do they eat well? What are you feeding them? ..._any_ other information you can give?

First, let me appologize in advance here if it sounds as though I am talking down on you or like you dont have any clue about fish and aquariums. Since it is hard to guess exactly what you know, I am just trying to cover all the bases here so please dont feel offended by any of this:

I am going to go with my gut instinct here and ask you if you use a dechlor conditioner in this tank every time you add new water? If so, does that product also address the equally toxic chloramines? If not, this could very well be the reason that your fish are acting 'itchy' rubbing on rocks/decor. Seeing as how you point out that you have been away from the hobby for quite some time, I imagine that a lot of things have changed. I know quite a few people who are similar to you in that they have a lot of experience, but from decades ago. In a few of those cases, a person may have been fully aware of the need to rid the chlorine from tap water before adding it to a tank, but were not aware of the somewhat newer strategy of cities changing over to adding chloramines versus chlorine and so did not consider buying a product which will do both. Basically, chloramines are just a bonded chlorine and ammonia molecule and are used because they do not 'gas out' or leave water as easily or quickly as regular old chlorine can/does. while it makes sense that any chlorine remover should still work since it just clings to the chlorine half of a chloramine molecule, which it does and can do, however, it is possible for chloramines to remain present in a tank regardless of being conditioned, or if the dechlor does break the bond to make chlorine and ammonia become seperate, the chlorine may still remain. Long story short, IMHO, it is best to use a dechlor conditioner which attacks both issues and you can go one step further and get a dechlor product which removes chlorine, chloramines, AND ammonia all at the same time.....which brings me to my next gut feeling...

Again, I am sure you already have, but this sort of behavior is also a symptom of ammonia poisoning in fish. Granted, there should be less need to cycle a planted tank, as far as I have been told thus far, but I am also pretty sure that there is a limit to how rapidly plants can remove ammonia from the water and so I think it is still possible for ammonia levels to obtain a damaging or even toxic level. I think that if you put plants in your tank and did not cycle it at least somewhat before adding even a semi-large number of fish all at once, your fish may be feeling the resulting ammonia which would make some sense to me because you say that they are rubbing up against things and darting around but otherwise they are acting normal. It could be that the ammonia levels are just enough right now that it is only irritating to your fish and not toxic yet, although there could be other issues happening which you cannot see such as gill damage.

Also, this rubbing can sometimes be a behavior witnessed in fish which have just recently been placed in a tank or if you happen to have a heavily male population rather than females. In some fish, this is more common than others, but in those cases, it is almost always a sign of dominance or like marking a territory. This might also explain why only a couple of your fish are acting this way right now. Maybe your two platties which are itching or flashing are in a struggle to see who is king of the castle while the others already know their place in the hierarchy and are fine with that status.

Lastly, if only a few more of your fish were showing the same signs, I would really be leaning hard toward thinking this is a case of Velvet. This is a relatively common issue but many people cannot recognize it in time, or at all, since it affects and appears slightly different on the various species of fish. It can almost be completely limited to a fish's gills but it most often looks like your fish are rusty or have a golden-ish dust on their body. A lot of times, once it becomes really visible to you, it is too late and so it is pretty fatal for that reason. This means that it can be 'invisible' to you for a long time but it has the same sort of symptoms as you are pointing out here as far as the rubbing on objects and suddenly swimming across the tank rapidly and bumping into things. Another symptom is rapid or labored breathing by the fish, which I guess is hard to determine at times, especially if the fish simply appears 'winded' from dashing around the tank. The treatment for Velvet can be similar to Ich as far as the use of salt goes, but generally, a salt 'bath' works better because you can add much more salt in a seperate vessel and then just net the fish and submerge it in the saltwater. A few sources I just looked at suggest using a 3% salt bath, which is just shy of true saltwater. Obviously, you cannot keep the fish in there for days or weeks on end, so it is not feasible to add that much salt to your main tank. This treatment is sort of frustrating because Velvet is so contagious that you could have a fish all but cured right before it starts all the symptoms again. Also, you should really give all the fish this salt bath since it could have Velvet, but you cant see it yet, not to mention it is contagious. By almost all accounts, copper based treatments are considered most effective...however, obviously using copper in an aquarium means that any inverts who are also in there will most likely die in a short time, and you would almost certainly never be able to keep inverts in that tank again since it is very very very hard to get the copper out...even if you throw everything away that is inside, clean the tank 15 times, and start over, over time, copper can leach back out of the tank via the silicone seals and what not, to build up to toxic levels again.

Lastly, I will just reiterate how diagnosing illnesses and diseases is often very tough for us to do with any real accuracy. While I am sure that we can guess close most often, and since a lot of the treatments we use are broad spectrum treatments, we can get results even if we are slightly off with labeling the problem we are seeing. I bring this up because there is a very great chance that I am completely wrong with all of these guesses here, as well as it being possible that everyone who posted here so far is wrong as well, so it is really yourself who is going to have the best chance at narrowing things down because you are able to see everything first hand.



> 3 teaspoons per 10 gal may be a tad strong for some plants. I've pushed up to 9 teaspoons per 10 gal without any long term damage to anubias, swords, val, and java fern.


In your other posts on the forum Furballi, you say a similar thing, but using tablespoons rather than teaspoons. There is a pretty big difference between one or the other and so even I would like to know which spoon you are suggesting to use here. If you say that three teaspoons is a tad strong for some plants, but then go up to three teaspoons, then you have been agreeing with me this entire time but still debating me on the subject. IMO, three teaspoons per 10 gallons of water is the usual recomended dose for a tank which has scaleless fish in it, otherwise it would be double that amount at 6 teaspoons per 10 gallons with Three teaspoons = One tablespoon


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## Tsquare (Feb 9, 2007)

Mad Dog thanks for your help. The scraping was being done by 1 male and 1 female but it has stopped for the last 2 days. There are 2 females and 5 males (I know bad ratio) but couldn't be sexed when purchased from LFS a few weeks ago. I think I will just take a wait and see attitude. I just started DIY CO2 a couple of weeks ago and the plants are now starting to show signs of good growth so I don't want to screw that up.
Gene


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## Mad Dog (Mar 3, 2007)

Tsquare said:


> Mad Dog thanks for your help. The scraping was being done by 1 male and 1 female but it has stopped for the last 2 days. There are 2 females and 5 males (I know bad ratio) but couldn't be sexed when purchased from LFS a few weeks ago. I think I will just take a wait and see attitude. I just started DIY CO2 a couple of weeks ago and the plants are now starting to show signs of good growth so I don't want to screw that up.
> Gene


Gene,

I think that having patience with this situation is by far the safest and most responsible. While I understand that applying a treatment to an illness/disease as soon as possible would increase the odds for success, I feel that it in important to realize that since meds and other treatments are obviously designed to kill bacteria, viruses, fungus, etc, they also have the ability to kill the fish themselves. Keeping that in mind, IMHO, you dont really want to end up being wrong about a premature diagnosis or attempt to use meds or treatments as a preventative measure very often, if at all. Also, IMHO, I think salt can be pretty harsh to your fish in certain circumstances and really, the only preventative measure or treatment for an unknown ailment that I would even start to consider would be to use melafix and/or pimafix. I recently had a similar situation in which one of my saltwater fish had some myseterious illness that I couldn't diagnose with any certainty and so I moved it into my q-tank and just dosed both melafix and pimafix every day. In the end, that did work for me and I put the fish back in my main tank (only to get eaten a couple days later by an anemone....which is sort of shocking). Again, I am not real sure about how those products might affect plants, but I would think that a saltwater fish may be just as sensitive, or much more sensitive to items in the water as FW plants would be (at least for the most part)....but that is just a guess at this point, and not even a very educated guess either.


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## JanS (Apr 14, 2004)

Mad Dog said:


> One of the biggest issues here is that unless you are a vet, a biologist, ichthyologist, or something along those lines, we are basically making semi-educated guesses when diagnosing issues we find on our fish.


That's exactly right, and it's a big reason why I don't recommend dosing any meds unless you're positive of what you're dealing with. In most cases the best remedy for a fish that doesn't feel well is nice clean water, so lots of water changes do worlds of good. 



Mad Dog said:


> IMHO, I think salt can be pretty harsh to your fish in certain circumstances and really, the only preventative measure or treatment for an unknown ailment that I would even start to consider would be to use melafix and/or pimafix


I agree here too, and while salt can work great in certain situations, it can do just as much harm in others, so with any ailment, the problem needs to be nailed down before doing anything.

Not to veer off topic here, but what kind of a fish did your anemone eat Mad Dog? :shock:


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## Mad Dog (Mar 3, 2007)

> Not to veer off topic here, but what kind of a fish did your anemone eat Mad Dog? :shock:


LOL, believe it or not, I have lost...not lost as in died, but lost as in I cannot find them anywhere...two green spotted mandarins, about 4 green chromis (I had 9 of them, now I count 5, but then again, there may be six or four left...hard to count them since they are constantly moving around) and believe it or not, I noticed last night that one of my maroon clown fish is also missing. I haven't done the super thorough search that I have done for the other fish, so that clown might just have died or is hanging out behind the rock work (the 'mated pair' the LFS had advertised and then sold to me are not very much of a pair at all.) The hard thing to believe is that the missing clown fish is the only one of the two that host in that anemone, which sort of highlights the anemone as a culprit once again. Still, I guess there is a slim chance that the missing fish all died in some area which I cannot see even though I took out half the live rock to look for them. However, if it was one fish, then that would be understandable, and even two fish could be a coincidence, but the odds of 7 fish dieing where I cannot find them at all has to be astronomical!


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## meredymae (Jan 5, 2007)

Tsquare said:


> A couple of my Platies are darting and scraping against plant leaves etc. I"m sure they have some kind of parasite or fish lice. They otherwise seem fine. How do I get rid if the problem short of getting rid of the fish?
> Gene


Mine do that when I change the water, even if the Ph and temps are the same. I change 30% every Saturday in a heavily planted 10-gallon tank. I used to freak out about it but they've been fine for over a year and won't stop reproducing.

I've kept platies only as fish in my planted tanks for a long time until a few weeks ago when I got some swords. No illness so far with the platies in planted tanks.


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