Can you post a video? Linking to You Tube works well. I want to see the angel’s breathing rate. The one shot of it laying on its side does not bode well I’m afraid!I I woke up in the middle in the night today and saw my fish doing this, all my other fish are fine and my parameters are fine so I don’t know what’s wrong, the only things that were out of the ordinary that happened lately was I was setting up a automatic feeder and a bunch of fish food fell in a few times, I took all of it out but he ate every time, also he has been pooping like this for a couple of months.
https://youtube.com/shorts/QpG9ALJbyBQ?feature=share https://youtube.com/shorts/5d9sE3xTxrQ?feature=share https://youtube.com/shorts/t5EU8g0FZys?feature=share he tried to swim to the top a few times but just fell back down again, I don’t understand what went wrong, the second picture is from yesterday and he looks fine.
How big is your display tank? Medication is dosed by volume and it’ll kill your shrimp, so you might want to set one up quick. You’re going to want to get copper power or copper safe medicine and medicate all of your fish with it at full strength for 30 days. Whatever the flame angel has, the rest have been exposed to. Read here for the protocol to follow:
Sorry, I was in meetings all afternoon. The video shows that the angel is breathing really fast and is what we call moribund, or close to death. You can try a Hail Mary 5 minute freshwater dip, but that may just hasten its death. I think this may be a gill disease called velvet. It will likely spread to your other fish - what other fish have been exposed to this one? Do you have access to a tank that you can dose with copper? (No invertebrates).
Metroplex is an antibiotic, and will do nothing against velvet or other similar parasites. You need to get a copper treatment, and quickly, because even if this fish dies, any other fish that were in the tank with it have been exposed to whatever it is and are likely to get it now as well. All of the fish in the tank need to be treated for 30 days with therapeutic copper, and the tank needs to be left fallow for at least 45 days and turned up to 82 degrees F.
I have 2 clowns with it and a shrimp so I can’t dose anything at the moment, I would have to make a extra tank to put my shrimp in. So is there nothing I can do for the fish, also could this be happening from shock or something I just did a water change and my salinity went down a little and I accidentally left my heater unplugged overnight? And can velvet affect a fish overnight like that because he was fine yesterday but he was just hiding a little more than usual.
A temperature or minor salinity drop won’t cause this. Velvet has very subtle symptoms at first, and fish can die 36 or so hours later, so it is very fast.
