Fry getting pale and dieing. Parasites?

[death_adder]

Been having issues with fry die offs and have noticed that those that stop eating and being active have very pale gills and body these are both photos of Albino bn fry roughly the same size and same tank. You can see the difference from healthy red to pale white, its not affecting large amounts at anyone time I'm thinking some sort of parasite that adults and sub adults have no trouble dealing with.
I do worm with kusuri but thinking is missing something any ideas on treatments? I'm religiously monitoring water conditions and do daily waterchanges.

20170314_195716.jpg (48.92 KiB) Viewed 3886 times

[Linus_Cello]

Can you post the info in the sticky (e.g., water temps, etc; do you have substrate?):

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4305

[death_adder]

1. Water parameters
a) Temperature range. 25-26
b) pH. 6.6-7
c) GH. 1
d) KH 1
e)Ammonia 0 Nitrate 0 Nitrite 5-10
f) Water change frequency daily 50% this tank same condition happens in all tanks though with many different water change frequencies
(Most LFS's will check your water and give a list of readings).

2. Tank set up
a) Size. 400litre
b) Substrate. bare bottom
c) Filtration. k1 / settling tank
d) Furnishings. wood
e) Other tank mates. nope
f) How long has it been set-up? 24 months
g) When was the last new fish added? 24 months
h) Foods used and frequency?
zucchini buk choy home made gel food algae wafers.

[death_adder]

if your going to say bare bottom tanks can cause issues i have experimented with both and found no difference.
every inch of the tank is rasped by all the bn constantly so doubt any bacterial Layer can build up

[death_adder]

if your going to say bare bottom tanks can cause issues i have experimented with both and found no difference.
every inch of the tank is rasped by all the bn constantly so doubt any bacterial Layer can build up.

[bekateen]

From your original post, I'm inferring that this is a new problem for you and that in the past you don't have fry die. But in my experience there's always some mortality.

How many fry are you actually losing? 5%? 10%? 50%? 100%? Honestly, if the percentage dying is less than 20%, I'm not saying it's good but I doubt it's a parasite.

More likely, I'd look at food access, stress, competition, or perhaps bacterial infection.

You say you're doing 50% water changes on a daily basis? And your tank is 400L? But there are no other fish in the tank but these little BNs? How many little BNs do you have in this 400L tank? I ask because honestly I think if you have even a few hundred tiny BNs in the tank, you're overkilling the water changes and that may be part of the problem. Yes clean water is important, but water changes are stressful, all by themselves. Personally, I keep fry in small tanks (40L or less) until they are of a significant size so that I can control access to food.

As for food, I treat pleco fry in the reverse way - I prefer to leave some of the parents' poop in the fry tank (I'll even add it to the fry tank if I'm housing fry and adults separately), operating under the hypothesis that the fry get some nutritional value, or possibly healthy gut microorganisms, by consuming parents' poop. I know most breeders don't do that. And I can't say for sure that it's great. But it seems to help for me. Also, even for plecos, when they are really tiny, I pulverize algae pellets and other foods into dust, then wet the dust and apply it to the tank floor with a turkey baster. I think it's a little easier for baby plecos with tiny mouths to feed on than forcing them to scrape hard food at such as small size.

Good luck, Eric

P.S. Please don't double post.

[death_adder]

Its happened for years. I reckon common bn maybe 20% albino bn 40% and Peppermint bn 60% when same conditions diet ect so commons being more robust seem to do the best. I've experimented with micro managing fry with isolated tanks and different conditions with no major change. I leave some fry with parents others i move seen no notable difference in survival. parents tanks get less water changes. Never have mass die offs always one or two a night for first 3 months then they seem to be fine after that.

[death_adder]

feeding I've experimented with many different regimes with no stand out differences

[stuby]

Eric has some very good points! Doing large water changes are actually very hard on fry... or any fish but fry are the ones you notice as they can and do die off if you do such large water changes to fast. Being that you are changing 50% every day (that's about 50 US gallons) I'm sure you don't sit there for a hour filling the tank back up, so I am sure you are doing it way to fast!! Another thing is make sure you clean the glass..... if there is a bacteria buildup it can and does kill fry and the adults very well may not be affected at all. It is possible that a parasite is involved..... but from what you have said my money is on water changes to large and fast!

HTH
Chuck

[death_adder]

as said happens in the tanks with much smaller water changes as well. the water changes are automated and happen 3 times a day about 17% a change. in most my tanks there's only one water change and is only about 8% daily.

[bekateen]

Its happened for years. I reckon common bn maybe 20% albino bn 40% and Peppermint bn 60% when same conditions diet ect so commons being more robust seem to do the best. I've experimented with micro managing fry with isolated tanks and different conditions with no major change. I leave some fry with parents others i move seen no notable difference in survival. parents tanks get less water changes. Never have mass die offs always one or two a night for first 3 months then they seem to be fine after that.

I'll be honest. I know some people are better at breeding than others, and I don't count myself on the high (better) end, to be clear. But I also know plenty of "good" breeders that lose lots of fry as they grow, just as you are describing. Yes you may be able to improve survival, and yes I think there's something wrong with the peppermint fry losing 60%. But 20%, even 40% is not unheard of among many breeders.

Stop and think about it for a moment - the adults produce hundreds of eggs in each clutch. And they can reproduce many times in their lifespan. But in nature, they need only two juveniles (out of potentially thousands of eggs) to survive to adulthood and spawn; if they get two offspring to adulthood, they've maintained their population. Sure, lots in nature will get eaten, or parasitized, or killed by combat (for natural examples, I'll ignore those fished out by collectors). Also, with that many eggs and sperm involved, you have to imagine that there are plenty of babies that will hatch with some kind of birth defect and they will die early in life.

In nature, only two need to make it. So if you're having 60%-80% survival out of hundreds of eggs over the lifespan of your adults, that's still pretty good.

Never stop trying to improve your technique, but recognize that everyone has limits, and nobody gets 100% survival with all species all the time.

Cheers, Eric

[bekateen]

P.S., among people I speak to on breeding Panaqolus, there are certain ages, especially around 2 weeks post-hatching, where mortality rates seem to spike naturally (up to half of fry can be lost in a couple of days, clutch after clutch after clutch). I don't know what's going on inside their little bodies, but it seems to be a difficult time that we humans struggle to get them past.

[stuby]

In that case I wouldn't say it's the water changes...... but I would still cut back on it if it was me. Are you on well water or city water? What is your setup like.... as in how fast does it add water at what temp and does it add water from a holding tank or right from the tap?

I breed a lot of plecs and I have never had a loss of over 10% other than the dad eating the eggs/wigglers except once. That was because of the adults running over the fry.... so after taking the adults out I didn't have any losses from that group. I may loss a few from a group.... but even that is a lot for me.

Chuck

[bekateen]

I breed a lot of plecs and I have never had a loss of over 10% other than the dad eating the eggs/wigglers except once.

Chuck, are you getting 90% survival from the total number of hatchlings? Dang, I want to get that good.

Cheers, Eric

[stuby]

If I don't get at least a 90% survival rate I feel I am doing something wrong! That includes the L104's..... so I am not sure what I am doing right but I guess I better stick to it!

[death_adder]

water change is done through a reservoir dumped in Sump then pumped through. Sump gets drained dry and filled with water fry that make it to the sump seem to do the best out of all of them and bit do they grow fast so i can't imagine water shock could be a factor

[raycam01_au]

I am breeding pepps, albino 397's in the same tank,
50% water changing daily is nuts, defo not needed my PH is around 5 pushing it, fed my tanks maybe once every 3 days, check you are rinsing or blanching your vegies before u add them to the tank, some nasty stuff on them from the supermarket

[TwoTankAmin]

At the risk of being way off base, I am going to jump in here. This sounds similar to a situation a couple of members here dealt with many years ago but with Hypans not Ancistrus. The adults would breed, they did fine but the fry kept dying. Eventually, some of them made it to a lab, they were diagnosed with oodinium (if I remember right) and the solution was ProForm C. I know the solution worked. Basically the older fish had some immunity to the parasite but the fry were completely vulnerable.

@Barbie was the one who managed to solve the problem, so perhaps she will chime in here as I am not at all sure this is the issue. Oodinuim does attack the gils but it also attacks the fish in a similar fashion to ich and is often treated in a similar fashion. It may be hard to see "velvet" on albino fish. If the fish are flashing on things, this would support this as being an accurate diagnosis. Note there are several varieties of this disease and they are different in salt water v.s. fresh.

I run both bare bottom and substrated tanks and have not had issues with either. When I remove fry from bare bottom breeder tanks, I need to pull most of the contents to catch them. My normal practice is to scrub the bottom glass with an algae scrubber before I put the tank back together. This has apparently done the job re a bio-film getting to the point where it might be harmful to fry.

I cannot say that I have ever had serious issues of fry loss. Like stuby, I expect a high survival rate. I should also mention that I almost never do more than a single weekly water change of at least 50% on tanks. Most of my fry losses are due to my doing something careless.

[bekateen]

I'd agree with TTA that an occult (meaning clandestine/hidden, not magical/supernatural) oodinium infection is a possibility. I've received the same advice from Barbie when I've had higher than desirable mortality among oil cat fry. Proform C is not available in any store near me, but I bought it online from a pond store in Washington state. The bottle was pricey, but it seems like a life-time supply for me. You use only 1ml per 10 gal, 3 days in a row for a standard treatment.

Unfortunately, I'm not able to report spectacular improvements in fry survival since buying the Proform C because my oil cats haven't spawned again since I got the medicine. Hopefully in the future I can extol the virtues of Proform C.

Good luck, Eric

[death_adder]

i did have oodinium outbreak last year due to a fish that wasnt quarantined long enough but the problem happened before that and i cant see any of the white dust on the pepps or common bn fry but might be worth treating just incase.