Is my oscar sick? (pictures)

[Jexnell]

Do you have any other fish in the tank? My Oscar lives with a school of Roseline sharks and a Synadonis cat and two spotted Raphael cats.

The Roseline sharks have learned to hover around Toni when she eats and eat up all the mess she makes, also they eat her poop, sounds nasty but they do it, like it never touches down on the bottom of the tank before they eat it all up. What the sharks don't eat, the cats clean up.

So do you have any cleaners to help lessen the amount of waste that end up in the filters?


Here is a pic of the sharks waiting for their portions of her food.

This one you can see the shark cleaning up the mess Toni makes. The cats do their work overnight, normally when I do my first feeding of the day the tank bottom is all cleaned up.

 

[pocky]

I have an adult BN pleco, sometimes my oscar eats his own poop when it's close to the food pellets...

 

[pocky]

So I found this other thread where everyone said they're sensory pits? I'm still going to do more water changes + clean up the canister. but so is it sensory pits or beginning of HITH?

https://www.monsterfishkeepers.com/forums/threads/id-hith-or-sensory-pits.152733/

 

[Jexnell]

They are sensory pits, so thats the rub. With all of those pits it is easy for then to get an infection and start off HITH.



See Toni has them as well.

 

[pocky]

So are you saying that it's normal and I shouldn't worry about them for now? And just keep up the clean water?

 

[Jexnell]

Yes the pits are normal. They are surface hunters, it's part of thier system to find prey.
Since they have so many it's easy to get infected when kept in poor water, poorly feed. So it' up to us to keep them in good clean water and well feed with good quality food to prevent HITH.
I do fin lvl water changes every 3 days.

And also a good quality food, not feeders that can be ripe with diseases.

 

[Chockful O Phail]

Yes the pits are normal. They are surface hunters, it's part of thier system to find prey.
Since they have so many it's easy to get infected when kept in poor water, poorly feed. So it' up to us to keep them in good clean water and well feed with good quality food to prevent HITH.
I do fin lvl water changes every 3 days.
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And also a good quality food, not feeders that can be ripe with diseases.

Well said!

 

[Rocksor]

What are your nitrate readings?

 

[Jexnell]

Out of curiosity I tested them, both nitrite, and nitrate were at 0

 

[Rocksor]

There is something either wrong with your tank or the testing of nitrate. It should not be yellow on a cycled tank. There should be a tint of orange. Re do the nitrate test, and make sure to shake bottle number 2 of the nitrate test for 2 minutes vigorously. The contents of bottle #2 will clump up over time in as little as 7 days of non-shaking and produce false nitrate results.

Out of curiosity I tested them, both nitrite, and nitrate were at 0

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