Thanks high, I hope I remember some of the old tricks from years ago.
Yes, Arowanas RULES!
Well sunpoe, its a long story. Basically after certain amount of time passes by doing other things in life and what not I never found the time to get back into it.
But long story short, I went to one of my wife's co-workers house durint Turkey day, and saw they had a 30 gallon tank and asked the husband what are they keeping, so he tells me a austrailian arowana, I said 'cool' since I had one years ago. Before anyone jumps up and down, I told him that tank is too small for a jardini, and took a look at the bugger.
It was a 3 inch jardini, but god damn..it was all messed up. Eyes were all clouded up, swimming at a angle and what not. Needless to say I laid into the guy, and he said it wasn't his fish to maintain but his 12 year son. What the hell.
The tank was smelly, murky and crap...and that brought back memories of my jardini. So what I did was, I took the arowana from the idiot and gave him 20 bucks.
I took the jardini home, and realized I don't have a tank set up, but I do have a 10gal that used to hold my wife's betta.
So I cleaned out the tank, added the water, yes believe it or not I still had some of my old stuff from way back, the old standby sponge filter!
I know its not good to put the lil bugger in without aging the water, but it was a drastic situation, I acclimated the lil bugger and seemed to be no problem.
Being the holiday I had to wait til Fri. morn to pick up some stuff from my LFS.
Prior to that, I called up an old college room mate that had extensive background on aros, mainly asians. His grandfather and uncles worked in a arowana farm in malaysia or singapore..one of those places.
So I told him what the problem with the jar was, and he said to get melafix and epsom salt. Make sure to crank the water temp up to 84-86 degrees and just maintain good clean water, do a daily partial w/c about 10-15%, maintain at least a 0.5% salt ratio and observe. Sounded simple enough i think to myself.
Well after 3 weeks of doing the treatment, the lil bugger's eyes have cleared up completely but the right eye is kinda screwed up, the pupil is a lot smaller..looks like a dot now and he seems to be able to see. He's still swimming at a slight angle but not as bad when I first saw him. His appetite is back and he's dogging up plankton and goes nuts for mealworms.
During the 3 weeks I called and pestered my friend and got some great info, and he told me that the jar had swim bladder problems, and usually the treatment that he prescribed will clear it up. He did state that it may take a few weeks up to few months, with no guarantee of full recovery. He gave some links to sites that deal with arowanas, but most of them were hard to understand because of it being overseas and these cats have real bad writing skills/english language. So I just started googling and found this site, which blows my mind on what so many of you have done and accomplish in your own setups.
After having sifted thru the MFK site, I want to convert my garage into my own little haven of fishdom, but it'll take some time and a whole lot of convincing the old lady.
Needless to say this is what re-sparked my interest in fish keeping.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention he has grown an inch since having him in my "hospital" tank. I'm hoping that he'll make a full recovery, if not I'll still keep him. It would be a shame to put him to sleep.
Also the tank is cycled because I went to one of my friends house that has a 180g cichlid tank and stole some biomedia and gravel from him.
