Quarantine: further treatment options Eg for isolating, caring for, treating and nurturing weaker, sick discus fish and when they are unwilling to eat.
Temperature treatment in the quarantine tank:
If a fish has problems with growth, greedy eating, or if it has white faeces, raising the temperature to 33-34 °C usually helps. This accelerates the metabolism, improves food intake, optimizes intestinal throughput and the fish's immune system
strengthened. Attention: at 36° C the temperature is deadly for the discus fish. Temperature treatment is preferable to drug treatment, since a drug can weaken the fish's immune system and thereby cause other diseases to break out. The temperature treatment should be in a quarantine
Aquarium can be carried out and lasts until the fish is strong again and deposits dark droppings again for at least three days. This is usually two to three weeks of treatment. It is also important that the animal receives our food at least three times a day so that it can regain its strength.
Equipment of the quarantine tank heating element, filter (already retracted), air vents.
TIP:
Aggression, restless behavior = reduce temperature by 1-2 °C.
Fish that are too calm and stiff = increase the temperature by 1-2 °C.
Keeping discus fish healthy
- 1. Quarantine & Temperature Treatment
- 2. Salt bath for external parasites
- 3. Ointment treatment
- 4. Activated carbon filtration against poison
- 5. Bacterial tolerance testing
- 6. Additional note on scalars
- 7. Emergency kit
- 8. Discus fish on vacation
- 9. Parasite-free discus fish
- 10. Stab wounds
- 11. Substrate cleaning
Salt bath treatment recommendation: eg treatment for external parasites
The salt bath consists of 500 grams of iodine-free table salt in fifteen liters of aquarium water. It is best if you take a bucket with 15 liters of water from the affected aquarium (this means that the temperature and the water parameters are identical to the original water of the affected fish). Dissolve the 500 grams of table salt in this water (wait 2-3 minutes until the water is clear again). Then let the affected fish swim in this salt water for 30-60 seconds and then back into the original
Reset Aquarium. Never leave the discus fish in the salt water for more than a minute, otherwise the dose will be deadly after 5 minutes at the latest! This treatment removes the external parasites that are on the fish. The remaining external parasites in the aquarium are fought by the fish's immune system. If the fish is already very weak, it is more promising if the animal is placed in another aquarium after the treatment. A single treatment is sufficient in most cases.
Ointment treatment, eg for hole disease Treatment recommendation: Nystatin ointment
After more than 30 years of debate, the experts still do not agree on what causes hole disease. Most say that a mineral deficiency is the trigger. Through years of testing, we have found that in about 90 % cases, an over-the-counter ointment against skin fungi brings very quick and reliable results. This ointment is called Nystatin ointment, but it should be noted that it does not contain zinc. It can easily be bought in any pharmacy without a prescription.
Symptoms:
In the beginning, the fish have acne-like pimples in the head area, which later burst open. After bursting and leaking, sometimes very deep craters form in the skin.
Treatment:
Catch the affected fish from the aquarium, lay it on a damp cloth, dab the holes dry with kitchen roll and rub the ointment into the holes with your fingers. Then put the fish back in the aquarium.
With a little practice, such a treatment takes 30-60 seconds. However, a fish can easily spend 3-5 minutes out of the water. For small holes, a single treatment is usually sufficient. For holes larger than 5 millimeters, you should repeat the treatment after a week.
Activated carbon filtration: suitable for removing (filtering) harmful and undefinable toxins from the aquarium water
If fish become shy, jumpy or stand in the dark in the corner after the water change, this can be due to toxins in the tap water, eg pesticides from agriculture, which tend to appear in spring and autumn. If the eating behavior of all fish deteriorates, often helps
also a one or two week filtering over activated carbon, or at least a 30 percent water change. To remove these toxins, we recommend filtering over activated charcoal for a week or two. This is done as follows:
Put about 500 grams of activated charcoal in a bag or nylon stocking and wash it under tap water until no more black water comes out. Then place the sachet in the filter or, if that is not possible, at the outlet of the filter so that the water flows through the carbon
becomes.
Important: Please be sure to remove the activated charcoal bag after three weeks at the latest, as activated charcoal has the property of storing toxins. If the storage is completely full, it releases the toxins again in a short time. This would result in the death of all fish.
Test bacterial tolerance in fish and plants
To test whether you can add plants or fish to your aquarium, it is advisable to stock a quarantine aquarium with these plants or fish. Then please bring a “trial discus” together with the newcomers in the quarantine aquarium for a week.
It is strongly recommended to test this test procedure before each new stocking of fish or plants, so that you can rule out the risk of diseases being introduced into your aquarium through this test.
To do this, you need a quarantine tank with the following equipment:
60 liter complete set with heater and filter, thermometer and air stone. See “Quarantine” above. A discus that can turn dark (no pigeon blood) is recommended as a test fish. If bacterial intolerance occurs, the discus usually turns dark on the third or fourth day, clamps its fins and looks for a corner of the aquarium. In such a case, the safest thing to do is to get rid of the entire contents of the quarantine tank and not put any fish or plants in your aquarium. If everything is still fine after a week, you can usually put the newly acquired plants or companion fish together with the sample discus fish in your aquarium without any risk. During the test phase, please ensure that no drops of water (wet hand, hoses, buckets, etc.) from the quarantine aquarium get into your discus aquarium.
Bacterial Compatibility:
We strongly advise against mixing our STENDKER discus fish with Asian offspring or wild catches!
Animals from different breeds / sources can have different strains of bacteria and should therefore not be kept together because of the risk of disease introduction! If you already have our STENDKER discus fish, you can add animals from our breeding farm at any time, also in different colors and sizes, without hesitation.
We guarantee that our discus fish are free of tapeworms and the so-called discus disease!
Additional notes on scalars
Angels are also often mixed with a discus group. We do not recommend this because angelfish are usually infected with tapeworms, which the angelfish do well with, but which can cause great problems for discus fish. In addition, the angelfish often eat more greedily than the discus fish and make it difficult for the discus fish to eat.
If you still don't want to do without scalars in your discus aquarium,
please do a tapeworm treatment with the scalars beforehand, as we describe in the last section of this chapter.
Treating angelfish against tapeworms:
Tapeworms significantly affect the health and growth of discus fish. Our STENKDER discus fish are tapeworm-free, but they probably wouldn't stay that way with these companion fish. In our opinion, the only way, if you don't want to do without this composition with angelfish, is to treat the angelfish against tapeworms beforehand and only put them with the discus after this treatment.
Angelfish Tapeworm Treatment Use Tremazol or other parziquantel-based medication as directed.
As an emergency set for the home, we recommend:
1. Activated charcoal bags (from pet shops)
You can use activated carbon to filter any toxins out of the water. The activated carbon bag should be removed from the pool after three weeks at the latest, as the toxins are returned to the water once the carbon has been saturated! Activated carbon can be stored dry for years without losing its effectiveness. Activated charcoal bags are also recommended if the fish show "disease" although the water parameters appear OK. Some toxins cannot be detected immediately.
2. Quarantine tank
Equipment: 60 liter complete set with heater and filter, thermometer and
Air stone (membrane pump) A bucket, bathtub or a fish box made of Styrofoam, which you fill with tap water (at the right temperature), is also suitable as an emergency aquarium. Equip your emergency pool/quarantine with an outflow (diaphragm pump), a heating element and a thermometer. Our discus fish can survive for weeks in this emergency tank with normal tap water. However, since there is no filter, you should definitely not feed them! The animals can do without food for a good few weeks (holidays).
Tips for your vacation
Most fish die on vacation because the neighbor means too well and feeds them too much. Therefore, it makes more sense to simply take a feeding break for your fish during your vacation. Because discus fish from 10 cm in size and other half-grown fish can easily survive 2-3 weeks without food. Older and larger animals even survive longer lean times of 1 to 2 months. Such fasting periods also occur in nature every year and can even be very beneficial to health. There is no need to change the water during this time, as there is hardly any contamination due to the lack of feeding.
Please note:
– Control the light in your aquarium using a timer
– To have an additional (second) pump/filter running permanently as a failsafe (do not accidentally connect it to the timer for the light!)
– Decreasing the water temperature to 27°C (mitigates the hunger of the fish, makes them calmer and lowers their metabolism)
After the holiday, you should initially feed your fish little and gradually increase the number of meals. The animals and the filters first have to get used to the normal amount of food (increase the number of bacteria and the filter performance).
Our STENDKER discus fish are NOT parasite-free, but free from tapeworms and the so-called discus epidemic. Due to their strong immune system, our discus fish have strong defenses against the usual parasites. We continue to recommend feeding our popular STENDKER-Good Heart food so that the immune system of our discus fish remains strong. Our feed is ideal as a complete feed, contains everything the discu fish needs for a healthy diet and is also eaten by other fish species.
If a discus fish bites a human, we recommend: pressing on this spot until a drop of blood comes out, which cleans the wound to avoid infection.
Substrate cleaning with the Mulmglocke to remove a hydrogen sulphide
To prevent or remedy poisoning:
The fish have been fine for weeks and months and suddenly that changes
behavior of animals. The fish are no longer so trusting, jumpy, breathing becomes faster and the animals no longer feel so well. The cause of this is often hydrogen sulfide poisoning, which is caused by soil contamination. This becomes visible through rising bubbles when moving the substrate. These are putrefactive gases that form in the substrate. This can be avoided or remedied by cleaning the substrate with the mud bell when changing the water. We recommend carrying out this process once a week.