How to treat and prevent fungal infection on your aquarium fish?
- Oct 08, 2020
- Anshika Mishra
- 2669 0 0
Does your aquarium fish have some kind of Fuzzy, Whitish-grayish patch of growth on its mouth or body? It could be a fungal infection. Here you will learn the most effective treatments against fungal infection and how to prevent it from coming back.
WHAT CAUSES FISH FUNGUS?
LIVEBEARER DISEASE
The first on the list would be livebearer disease because some of the livebearers come from where they are bred in brackish water, their immune system gets compromised their body starts shutting down, and what you need to do is quickly supplement with extra minerals and salts to help them get healthy again.
MAINTAINANCE ISSUES
Thankfully the other causes of fungus are usually a little more preventable because it is an opportunistic disease that likes to take advantage of stressed-out fish which have compromised immune system. For example, poor water quality is often a cause of stress for fish.
You will often see Betta fish with fungus because they are often kept in smaller containers with no heater and no filter. They can be easily remedied by giving them a bigger aquarium at least a 5-gallon or more in a heater that's around 78-80 degrees Fahrenheit. As well as using a filter or live plants or just more regular partial water changes to keep that water quality higher.
POOR NUTRITION
Poor nutrition is another cause of fungus because feeding you fish the same jar of flakes every single day is like giving a person hamburger every single day. Yes, they are not going to die but they might not be the healthiest individual with a strong immune system.
So, make sure you provide a wide variety of food so that they get all the essential nutrients that they need to be happy and healthy. Another thing to do is to feed fresh high-quality food. Fish food usually expires after 3 years of manufacturing, but your opening and closing this package constantly. There are moisture and oxygen getting in there and all this makes it kind of stale & gross after a while; like eating from a bag of chips after throwing three months.
So what you can do is split your fish food and pack a small portion of them in bags and keep them in the refrigerator. This way the food will remain fresh for a longer time because they wouldn't have integrated as much as they would at regular room temperature.
TREATMENTS FOR FISH FUNGUS
It is applicable for any sign of disease that you may see. Do a thorough cleaning of the aquarium. Not only this provide an optimal stress-free environment for your fish to recover but also a lot of medication requires you to not doing any water changes during the treatment period so you want to reset the clock on water changes.
Go ahead as take out that aquarium siphon, make sure to service the filter so all the gunk that is collected there is removed. As well as clean the front panel of the aquarium both on the inside and on the outside so that you can more clearly see any symptoms that your fish might have.
One type of fungus attacks the mouth of the fish, it is also known as mouth-rot, cotton-mouth where you will start seeing the white-grayish area around the fish's mouth. A lot of bacterial infection looks like that. So, in that case, you want to treat it with antibiotics.
After you have finished cleaning the aquarium go ahead and remove any chemical filtration because that would remove meds for you and then follow the instructions written on the box. Do not stop the treatment early ever. Maybe sometimes you see that there are no more symptoms and you think that you can save money by not dosing all the way. Well, a lot of times the infection is still there it is just not showing symptoms.
So make sure to follow the full treatment regimen to completely eradicate the infection.
If you see fungus on the body or cotton fin fungus, in that case, you have to treat with both anti-fungal and anti-antibiotic, because a lot of time the fungus attacks the body, leaves an open wound, and then bacteria come along and takes advantage of that.
ALTERNATIVE TREATMENT
If you live in a place where you can't medication, then just know that people don't usually have good experience with alternative treatments like herbal remedies just because the disease by the time you see it on the fish you will need to have a stronger medication to treat it, to give it the best chance of survival.
Aquarium Salt is highly recommended in this case, it is like kryptonite for the body and mouth fungus type. The reason why it is not no. 1 recommendation is because it is not safe for aquarium plants, it is not safe for invertebrates like snails, and also not good for certain fishes.
It is also a little bit harder to work with because this medication does not evaporate or break down on its own, it can only be removed through water changes. So, you will have some maths to know what is the current concentration of salt in your aquarium all the time.
You want to start with the weakest level one concentration of salt which is 1 tablespoon of salt for every 3-gallons of water. Go ahead and let that salt sit and soak in your aquarium for about 5-7 days. If there aren't any symptoms remaining then you can go ahead and remove it through weekly 30% water changes.
However, if the fungus persists you want to increase the salt concentration.
If the condition of your fish very more severs then jump to level 2, i.e. 1-tablespoon salt for every 2-gallons of water. But the fungus might again come back after a few weeks, then you have to shift to the highest concentration i.e. 1-tablespoon for every 1-gallon water.
Fungal spores are always present in our aquariums but thankfully full-blown infections are usually preventable as long as you provide a clean and stress-free environment and give them plenty of nutrients to your fish.
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