Please help with my last ditch effort!

[craniac24]

Hi everyone,

I posted in one of the other forums before how I had a blue diamond with all of the obvious signs of gill flukes. I've treated the whole tank with Prazi twice to no avail. His breathing is still very hard and his overall appearance is just terrible. I had a ray of hope last night as he came out of his hiding place to peck on some of my plants and driftwood, although I have yet to see him eat any "real" food at normal feeding times.

This morning I woke up to see him lying almost horizontal, breathing as hard as ever. I'm one step away from taking him out of the tank and putting him out of his misery, but I wanted to give it one more shot.

I have a quarantine tank set up, so I wanted to know what recommendations some of you might have. Should I give him a short term bath of some sort with a very strong dosage of medication or salt? Or should I simply isolate him for awhile with perhaps another "normal" dosage of Prazi and see how that goes?

Also...how does one deal with the fact that higher temperatures tend to promote healing, yet also provides less oxygen? This poor guy seems to be getting so little oxygen anyway, I would think that higher temps in a quarantine tank might do more harm than good.

Thanks for the help.

[Merrilyn]

Hi craniac, sorry to hear there has been no improvement. Gill flukes can damage the gills to the point where is is difficult for the fish to extract enough oxygen.

In this case, I think now there may be something more going on. Put him in the hospital tank and raise the temp to 30. You will need to add an airstone to the tank to help increase the oxygen in the water. Can you get hold of a decent antibiotic. Your fish shop should sell tetracycline or something similar. It would be better if you could get hold of some metronidazole from your vet or local doctor (also called Flagyl) use at 250 mgs per 40 lts of water, but being the weekend, that might be difficult.

Tetracycline is an excellent drug, but it will wipe out any bio filtration, so don't bother with a filter, just use a good airstone to turn the water over. HTH