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I've been treating my Gold Nugget for ich for the last week, he brought it with him from the LFS.

He has suddenly...

*tries to describe it*

Gone rigor mortis? He's completely prone, all fins extended and stiff. Breathing heavily and seemingly having no control over movement. He occasionally twitches, spasms really. He's actually stuck in a plastic log, due to his fins, moving the log only results in him sinking and bouncing around in it.

Temperature has been a steady 86°F, daily 20% water changes, salinity was raised to treat ich and I have been lowering it through water changes. He ate last night as the algae pellet was gone and waste was left in it's stead. Yesterday he seemed completely healthy, in fact I was going to start lowering the temperature down to 82. The quarentine tank has pleanty of aeration and filtration, a established AC150 and two air stones. I also did a water change yesterday on several other tanks, none of which have issues.

I did a 60% water change and checked the tanks water for signs of ammonia/nitrites,there are none. I'm lost as to what happened or what I should do. This just came out of nowhere after a week of having him in quarentine.

Anyone that has any ideas please reply, it would be very much appreciated.

might be easier to get a general ich medication from your lfs normaly a little less stress than messing with salinity or temperature. don't get me wrong both work but has the parasite recieded any or is it getting worse? can you please put your location in your profile and i'm sure someone and recomend a suitable treatment.

The parasite had disapeared by the third day of the treatment. In conjunction with the salt/temperature rise I was using a half-dose of cure-ich.The temperature/salinity increase was, of course, gradual. By the end of the third day of treatment it had maxed just as the use of medication had stopped. Given that another 4 days had passed since the disaperance of the parasite I find it rather unlikely that it had anything to do with this.

The pleco has survived and seems to be doing much better; as to what happened, I have no idea. Best I can figure is perhaps one of the airstones slipped above the water-line and there was a lack of oxygen? Pretty unlikely if you ask me. I'm not sure what else could have happened that he would recover so quickly from though. I raised the filter outlet above the water level just in case.

I have to admit that I disagree with your thoughts on salinity/temperature vs. medication. In my experiance the use of medication is more stressful and less effective. I tend to only use it in extreme causes, with the salt/temp, or on the recommendation of someone who has been sucessful with on a certain species.

Froggie

Hi I always try to keep nuggets at high temps when I first receive them. For some reason they are among the worst plecs for catching whitespot. They usually survive if treated promptly with a suitable medication. Bear in mind they are starved before shipping and this unfortunately does stress them out so an outbreak of ich after one week is not uncommon. Good luck

*sighs*

Cancel that thought that he was doing better. Again his pectoral and pelvic fins are stuck rigid, dorsal fanned out. It's sad to see him trying to swim with just his caudal. He gets stuck against the wall trying to get up. I helped him up and when he swam down he got stuck at a 45° angle between the base of the tank and the glass. Literally stuck.

This is a new one by me.