Discus - white slime coat issue.

[Tilapia-mariae]

Long story short about 4 days ago our two prized discus got a white mucusy cover over their entire bodies; within 24 hours had fins clamped, hard breathing and had gone a stressed out black. The next 48 since noticing it got worse and they were swimming wonky (thats if they moved at all)

I bought a umbee a month ago who appeared to have the same thing, I gave him a 38deg 15min salt bath with a huge airstone and it seemed to have burnt it off and came fine.

I did this to the discus (hot as salt bath) they looked shocking in the bucket floundering around, we put them back in and the infectee's swam back to their respective safe-zone filters. The next morning they both appeared to be moving around more, no more clamped fins, the white had almost completely burnt away and they decided to finally snack out on some bloodworm. 5th day running and our biggest discus has all its colour back and happily swimming around though one decent sized patch of its body seems to be lifting off (almost like a scab) and appeared to have fungused a little bit, but looks to be healing underneith the scab like fungus.

Since we spotted the problem we've been doing 1/4 tank wc's daily with a little more aquarium salt then we would normal use.

Question is we've got over the scary part of possibly losing our discus and are in the home stretch; can I just really saltify the tank in order to get rid of the fungus (have mates who swear by this) or as its not a cheap american cichlid im treating should we go and get some mala blue?

Having said this we havnt put the lights on the tank in 4 days since it was stressing our big discus out; now its looking better, do we leave the light off still with the fungus ?


Any help would be most appreciative,
Marc & Cat.

 

[mark razmandi]

sounds like it was a protozoan parasite...fungus is not common

 

[Lupin]

Hi,

Mark is right. Your post does not describe saprolegnia infection. Do you have photos of the affected areas? What are the water parameters? If anything, it may actually be costia which is exactly what your discus have, the way you described the issue. You can go with formalin to treat for costia.

Salt is not enough to remove the fungal infection. Malachite green at a drop per gallon dosage is the proper treatment to administer for fungal infections and most fungal infections have been mistaken for bacterial infections which are a very common type of disease around the aquarium industry.

Discus tend to like a subdued lighting environment so I would not switch on the light if it is too bright. In my experience, they preferred the subdued lighting and tend to freak out very easily in brightly litted tanks.

Hope this helps.

Lupes