Seriously need help with my fish and what I should do!

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Piicklez

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Sep 16, 2011
283
0
0
Midlands, England.
Hey guys, my fish are really ill and basically I don't know what to do.. Theres been some signs of illness from my severum for months (fungus on it's fin) but I just left it because it was just there and wasn't really too bad but now one of my oscars has what looks like HITH and they both have white spots on them, and the severum does too. The two oscars and the severum occasionally flick their head what looks like a twitch and my albino oscar has a big chunk missing out of his fin, which has steadily been getting worse, and now my big oscar has started loosing some of it's fins! I need help on what to do because I've never had sick fish before and I tried looking at treatments but for my 180 gal tank the treatment would cost something silly like £80 for a weeks dosage! I've tried some pond treatment from tetra which was suggested by the pet shop but doesnt seem to be working.

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This is the albino oscar with it's bad fin


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This is the big oscars fins, with more little holes which grow and cause a big gap in the fin like you see.


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Really bad HITH? It looks terrible, the big oscar also has one of these on its gill plate now also!


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Severum which has lots of marks all over it, and its back fin has a big split in it.

Any questions I will try my best to answer correctly.
 
I change about 20% of the water weekly, but recently it has been sometimes once every two weeks, ive started doing it weekly now again as I see this has happened. I don't know my water parameters, I will get it tested on soon. I've never fed them feeders, but the little oscar did used to eat a lot of prawns, but ive stopped it now as i thought that might be the cause of HITH. The only thing all of my fish eat are the Hikary pellets that are red (forget what they're called)
Thanks :)
 
I think the diet needs to be more varied. I fed my tilapia cichlid gold only for years and he developed HITH and I know water is perfect and I don't use carbon, and this was the only other thing I could find was the same food over a long time. Try mixing up pellets or add vitamins. While I agree hikari is a very good staple food I think its missing something that is important to fish health as I've seen a number of very well kept fish with HITH eating only one type of pellet
 
HITH is an opportunistic infection usually brought on by poor water quality, and/or high nitrates. Back in the old days when aquarists thought it bad to do water changes, it ran rampant.
Oscars are often greedy and messy, over eaters, and coincidentally often overfed, adding to the problem.
If I were in your shoes, as opposed to adding costly medications, I'd be doing partial water changes every other day, and vacuuming the substrate at the same time until it cleared up.
A day or 2 without food per week might also help.
 
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