L330 lost ALL color, now tan/pinkish HELP!

[Astrea]

Not my fish, don't have a pic and can't find one on the Net when I search. The L330 was *beautiful* a month and a half ago and now has lost all stripes and is a solid tan/pinkish color and of all things, looks like he has a SCALE pattern on him. Google search after Google search results in no articles and no pictures of anything close to this. Maybe I'm not putting in the right key words, I don't know. It just makes me so sad to even look at the guy and I'm desperate to help.

Does anyone have a clue? **If he can be helped**, I can manage to get him out of his situation and try to take care of him.

If nobody has any idea, I'll visit him again tomorrow and take his pic. I didn't have the camera today as it was an unexpected visit.

 

[Astrea]

These pics were taken on my camera phone, six weeks or so apart. The after pic was taken less than one hour ago. Any ideas yet besides 'he's toast'?

 

[matubula]

I seen this happen a few times now in Panaque, there is even a pic in the L190 Planet Catfish profile. As far as I know all fish that this has happened have survived and are healthy. Does yours have sunken eyes or belly?

 

[Astrea]

It's not my fish and he's not in my house yet, or I could give you better descriptions and pics. However.....

His eyes do seem sunken and definately not as vibrant red as they were, but without taking him out of the tank, I have no idea about his belly. He will not move from that spot and the tank is against the wall there where he stays stuck to the side. I swear to you, it seems like he has not moved on spec of an inch in six weeks. You can see by the pics he has not moved. I promise you, those pics are the same fish and they really are at least six weeks apart.

I finally came upon something on panaque plague, but I'll go over to PC and look at that L190 pic. There's not many plague pics on the net.

 

[knifegill]

He does look a bit thin. If anything, try to move him into a nearby tank with almost identical water parameters. There is a tank at my LFS that turns all the royals gold. But once moved into other tanks, they get their stripes back.

 

[Astrea]

Well.... panic mode over, maybe.

First of all, I noticed he was too stripey to be an L330, but I took the guy's word for it. He's really an L190 and they have been known to go through a color morph. PC was really helpful, I forgot about them for anything other than the Cat-e-log. Still doesn't explain why he hasn't moved for six weeks, but at least I know he's not going to keel over immediately.

Thank you both for taking the time to answer me. Muchly appreciated.

 

[zerojquan85]

well i dunno

That pleco does not look normal... the faded colors is signs of death... I too also saw the slight sunken in eyes...

I would watch it carefully..