Oscars are meant to die.

[poly-nomial]

dude...

its very simple , feed your oscar pellets. Feeding him feeders crickets worms your killing it. Oscars dont eat vegtables. Pellets make a perfect nutrition for oscars.
Your nitrates are high because your tank isnt cycled. you do 90% water changes that ruins all your biological filtration.... 20% once a week only. your water will eventually get better and better. That is all you need to do , dont even run carbon , it only removes medications and chemicals , dont use vitamins either , the damage is done . Just do everything right from now on. Good Luck man.

Oscars are fish too...

One of the very reasons some oscars get HITH is because their diet is not varied enough, they should have all sorts of non poisonous insects, worms, pellets and freeze dried krill to present ideal conditions. Oscars are not turds with fins, but one of my favorite fish.

 

[poly-nomial]

for people who think any one fish makes more waste then another .. remember food in = waste out .. your not going to see much if any diff in the amount of waste one fish makes compared to the next if they where to eat the same amount of food .. thats physics
Well a full grown oscar is about 12-13" long, 2-3" wide and 4-5" tall, so they are about the equivalent biolad of 25 or so very well fed Guppies.

to the comment about my water conditions .. the water is clean .. never any ammonia and other parameters are nice and low .. i just make sure that i clean the mech part of the filter well and get as much of the crap out of the rocks as i can. There really is not that much waste in the water floating around compared to whats in the sponge part of a Fx5 and down in the rocks .. so rather then cleaning the part of the tank with the least waste .. i clean where most of the waste is .. its a system that has worked for me for years ..
The only safe way i know of to wash mechanical media is to siphon water from your tank (dirty water) and wash it in that, never tap water. Just lightly swish it around to get the majority of the junk off.

but i must say that i have been (up to now) lucky with my water coming out of my tap. i had never used prime or anything else until they built the new hospital across the street and my water started coming out with TONS of chemicals in it. so that might be part of why i need less tank maintenance then some people.

again this is all my opinion and im not stating anything as law or fact .. since every time i say something here some piss hole has to tell me why im a total moron and i dont know how to keep MY! fish. so this is all my experience and how i do things .. i would not tell anyone to keep fish the way i do .. and im sure someone will put in there 2c why this is true.

How is he doing? It is a long lived disease, both an advantage and disadvantage. The advantage is you have time to get it under control. Disadvantage is it is a long lived process!

Good luck

 

[Iffrat]

How is he doing? It is a long lived disease, both an advantage and disadvantage. The advantage is you have time to get it under control. Disadvantage is it is a long lived process!

Good luck

again .. if you where to feed the oscar as much as the guppy .. they would make the same amount of waste ..

and i have always washed the sponge in the sink with tap water .. i just keep the bio rings in the filter and never mess with them... people say that you should not clean the sponge with tap water .. but i fail to see why .. i want them to be clean .. i have bio rings to keep the BB not the sponge filter part of the Fx5

care to give me proof on why this is not safe... since most people here think the OP might be lacking in the filtration maintenance which could be the reason of the HITH i feel this is not fully hijacking


and just like i said .. someone was going to drop there 2c on what i was doing wrong .. but its ok . you where not rude about it

 

[MadRussian79]

and i have always washed the sponge in the sink with tap water

Same here no problems.

 

[Cholly]

Same here no problems.

If you have bio rings/balls for media, it won't be a problem. If the sponge is your biological filtration media, you just killed 99.9% of your nitrifying bacteria. He has two HOBs, this WOULD kill his nitrifying bacteria.
Not everybody has a canister filter. Nor do many fully understand how the nitrogen cycle works. Please take this into account before posting, you're going to confuse the H-E-double-hockeysticks out of newbies trying to follow the thread only to sound superior.
Personally, and this is only my opinion knifegill, I'd back off of the 90% changes. 30-50% works in most cases as long as you're getting the extra food and poop out. If food isn't eaten after 5 minutes, get it out. When you do your waterchanges, make sure your getting the majority of wastes out as you vacuum. You have probably noticed "collection points", spots where you get a lot of gunk from, concentrate on those especially. Wednesdays my fish don't get fed, it's their fasting day. One day a week does not hurt them, in fact I believe it it is beneficial for their digestive systems. They don't always get to eat every day in the wild.
Believe me when I say I understand your monetary situation too, I've been "on the cheap" a lot more than not in the hobby, it has forced me to come up with creative solutions at times with materials on hand. That's why I suggested slitting the supply side of the "bio-bag" to get the charcoal out. And yes, I'm the same Cholly that mods on petfish, lol. I've noticed that there are a lot of us that use both boards, although I dunno if we use any of the same mods.

 

[knifegill]

you do 90% water changes that ruins all your biological filtration....

You must think the beneficial bacteria live in the water. Keep learning. You're on the right track. Just a little outdated. Thanks, though. If you don't believe me, go ask Kmuda on Oscarfish.com. Kmuda will be happy to school you or point you in the right direction.

Your nitrates are high because your tank isnt cycled

I like this gem, too. It makes even less sense. Actually, TheCanuck, none of what you added to this thread is correct. But it's good of you to be bold with what you know. It's how we learn.

Just scoop the excess food outta the tank if he doesnt eat it all. And if he does eat it all ur on the rite track i got 2 i feed mine more then once a week never had a chance of hole in the head because i wc weekly and remove all excess food

Oh, yeah. I'm a scooper. About every other day I take a giant shrimp net and grab all of the poo from the bare bottom of the tank. This is good advice for the keeping of any fish and I'm glad to hear it mentioned.

for people who think any one fish makes more waste then another .. remember food in = waste out

This is a good comment. It makes sense that fish can't magically generate waste if they aren't fed the source of waste. Conservation of mass and so forth. I do already feed as lightly as possible, fasting sometimes twice per week. And there is no debris at all in my system, except what builds up for the three weeks in each filter before I rinse it in the bucket of siphoned-out water. There is nothing for debris to be in, on, or under. It all goes every week, except for the living sponge colonies.

Hi, Cholly! I thought I knew the name from more than here. Thanks for the tips. I do remove all of the muck that I can, the only collection spot is where the turds swirl at the front of the tank. I scoop them out often. And I am only doing 50% changes from now on, since the HITH didn't appear until I increased the volume of changed water. For all I know, that is the only thing that stressed him out. Happy fishkeeping!

As a weak update, the one hole over his eye actually seems to be shrinking already! Hard to tell, though, because it was so small to begin with. Not a pore, though, it was too new, deep and white to have been a pore. I've memorized the guy's forehead in anticipation of this ailment.

 

[slimmer]

We lose more fish from overfeeding than starvation. Hith has appeared twice on me and both times it was due to poor water quality. Once with a red pike 20 years ago by me moving and setting up a 30 gallon in my parents basement, throwing in 100 feeders than forgetting about it for a month. Young and foolish. Second time by overstocking and minimal maintenance young and lazy. Takes along time for holes to cover up and sometimes they don't. In my understanding just because holes are evident does not mean that the fish is still sick.

 

[MadRussian79]

He has two HOBs, this WOULD kill his nitrifying bacteria.

If he did them at the same time it would trigger a tank cycle but fair enough that more advanced then the average hobbyist and was beyond me when I started. The safety of using tap to rinse your bio sponge will vary depending on how aggressive and consistant your municipality is with chemical decontamination. The only way to be sure is have your water levels tested on your tap regularly. The safest bet is as Cholly said use tank or filtered water (RO, DI, etc.).

 

[TwistedPenguin]

I feel for you. I've got 6 Oscars and HITH is always on my mind. Nitrates have literally never gone over 10 ppm, I feed bugs, pellets, VitaChem and spirulina. 5 of my guys I've raised from babies for several years. The 6th one I adopted at age 3 yrs & was raised by someone else in a 55 g tank with 2 other Oscars. They changed their water every 3-4 months and fed Koi pellets only. God knows that Oscar should've had HITH but he didn't. (He's doubled in size in the year I've had him though). I really believe it's a crapshoot. I also believe about 95% of HITH is caused by long term high nitrates but there's also that other 5% that seem to get it for no logical reason. Maybe it's minerals in the water...predisposition...who knows? Lack of Vit C has been brought up many times but VitaChem should cover that.
Edit: As far as water changes-the more the better with Oscars. You're not going to cause a mini-cycle by changing water (that's another myth). I do around 80% once or twice a week on Oscar tanks and they thrive.

 

[Iffrat]

Edit: As far as water changes-the more the better with Oscars. You're not going to cause a mini-cycle by changing water (that's another myth). I do around 80% once or twice a week on Oscar tanks and they thrive.

waste of water IMO ... and a huge waste at that ... using 400 gal a week (2 80% w/c on a 250 gal tank) that works out to be about 30 or so avg 5 min showers .. and thats just one of your tanks ...

and most people are not saying that its bad to do that much .. just that its not needed .. and that it causes stress on a fish ... my dats are almost always stable ... but every time i do a water change .. STRESSED OUT!!! .. so i keep them to 20% and they dont seem to mind that much ... if i pull 50% out of my tank they end up pure black and wont eat for a day or 2 .. now oscars are way way more relaxed then dats ... but i am sure it still has some effect ...