Tetras with white mouths (and a bit about rosy barbs)       3/19/15
Hi Crew,
I'd like to thank you once more for your previous advice, last time I wrote about a suspected case of Ich which is now resolved. I've had no more fish deaths since losing the last of the extra rosy barbs that I bought from the LFS, sadly Pinkie succumbed to his saddle ulcer in the end. I had him quarantined for the last week or so of his time, and whatever he had does not seem to have affected the rest of my fish. I still see the occasional white or clear stringy droppings from the rosy barbs but I am starting to suspect this is a result of them accidentally ingesting sand then excreting it in mucus as there are plenty of green and brown droppings too and they all seem healthy otherwise.
<Mmmm; what re water quality, foods/feeding, maintenance practices?>
Currently my 30gal tank has one head and tail light tetra, three adult rosy barbs, and all 16 of the barb offspring (ranging from 1cm to 2.5cm). I'm aware that this will be far too many rosy barbs when they grow up so I'm hoping to find a home for them in the big aquarium at work which currently only has a single small fancy (ugly) goldfish.
<Should be moved elsewhere>
I'm not sure that this will be a compatible mix though since even if 5+ barbs are added to keep them well behaved and not nippy, I think they might dominate at feeding time due to being more able-bodied and they might starve out the goldfish. Thoughts?
<All should get along w/ the GF removed>
The other option I have in mind is to set up better filtering in the backyard pond and to put some back out there. A lone
stray barb fry survived 2 weeks out there during the hottest part of summer, he was too good at hiding and got left behind when I brought the others that had hatched out there inside, so I think the pond does get enough shade to
keep the temperature down. Winters here are mild too.
<Good... barbs might live there; but not the Tetras likely in the winter>
With the threat of ich and Columnaris gone I have bought four more head and tail light tetras to keep my singleton Mr. Beacon company.
<Good name>
I've been trialing different plants in the main tank and do intend to keep it heavily planted (despite the best efforts of the barbs to eat/uproot everything, I've been finding this constant battle part of the fun of keeping fish) so I am hoping the HATL tetras will be happy in the environment. The LFS does not stock these tetras so I bought them online and besides, I hoped to
avoid a known source of diseased fish. When they got here, two of them had white coloured patches on their mouths, and one of them was very sickly, limp and skinny looking.
<I see this in your excellent pix>
My initial thoughts were that they may have scuffed their mouths against the plastic bag in transit, or gotten feisty with each other since they were all together in the one small bag, and gotten injured while fighting. The bag wasn't a breather bag and the skinny fish did perk up once out of the bag and in quarantine, he hides a bit but his appetite seems okay and his belly is filling out a bit more; he could have been underfed or oxygen starved maybe but I'm a little suspicious that he could have fish TB or some other disease that could cause skinniness. I've treated them with Praziquantel so far just in case they were skinny due to worms.
<Mmm; possibly>
I'm using the tank that the baby fish used to be in, the tetras have been in quarantine for a week now and I think that in two of them the white mark has gotten smaller but noticed today that a third one has a white mouth too. I'm a little worried it could be Columnaris not a wound, or a wound that got infected with Columnaris.
<Maybe>
I've attached some pictures, and also a picture of one of the friends I got for the false penguin tetra (they have their own tank now due to being too rough!) who has a similar mark. I don't know if it is just that these tetras fight or swim into things a lot; the quarantine tank that the four HATL tetras are in is too small and I know they aren't happy with the amount of space they have. I'm wary of treating with anything beyond a little bit of salt for now
<Good>
and I'm just hoping after another week or two in quarantine nothing will have worsened and I can get them into the bigger tank. Anyway I just don't have the experience to tell whether these white mouthed fish are injured or diseased or both. Hope you can help.
<Not w/ the data (or lack of it) provided>
I did end up getting a RO/filter system which has a mixer tap and a TDS inline meter allowing adjustment for both drinking water and aquarium water. I still don't quite have my head around converting TDS ppm to general hardness degrees - I did read somewhere that dividing ppm by 10 will loosely approximate French degrees but then I don't know whether French or German degrees are more commonly used.
<German... the D in these measures is for "Deutschen">
I haven't had any further shrimp deaths due to failed moults since I've started using 50-70ppm water for my shrimp tank so it's definitely helping. I'm wondering whether I should still be letting my RO-mix change water stand before I use it;
<Yes I would... at least a day; better, a week>
I haven't been, because I thought that it was only necessary to allow time for water treatment chemicals to do their work but is letting water stand useful for other reasons?
<Mmm; yes.... settling, combination.... of metals, non-metals... outgassing of undesirable gasses>
I have a 20lt plastic jerry can which I store the water in, this doesn't allow much exposure to atmosphere so should this
water be agitated? Or just tipped into buckets?
<Tipped is fine, aeration/circulation better>
Ok sorry this got to be a lot longer than I originally intended! I really appreciate the time you take with educating new hobbyists like me and reading our rambling emails.
<We appreciate the opportunity to interchange w/ intelligent, sensitive folk like you>
I've still got a lot of reading that I want to do regarding Corydoras as I have decided I'd like a biotope tank rather
than putting them in the community and making them compete with greedy barbs, and I think it would be easier to manage water softness and ph if I start again and do things differently in a new tank.
Thanks once again and I hope you have a great day.
Bronwen
<Welcome. Bob Fenner>

Re: Tetras with white mouths (and a bit about rosy barbs)      3/20/15    /Neale
With regards to the barbs occasional odd dropping, they are fed once daily or twice if I don't have time to watch them in the morning. If I am in a hurry they get a quick pinch of flake and then I take a bit more time in the evening feed to watch how much they are eating.
<Fine. Barbs are omnivores that will eat algae, some plant matter between "proper" meals.>
I have some frozen community blocks which contain both meaty and plant materials, I usually give this two to three times a week (slicing off a small amount and feeding little by little trying to avoid over feeding). I have some Spirulina sinking pellets (also contains other ingredients) that I bought for the shrimp but proved to be very popular with the barbs, they will carry the pellets around spitting them out and sucking them up again, gradually working on them until they soften up.
<Quite so, and an excellent staple for your fish... good nutrition, plenty of exercise, economical. My Cherry Barbs are fed these alongside the Limia they cohabit with.>
I crush some up for the younger fish but they seem to manage okay on full sized pellets, worrying at them until they break into smaller bits. I have some meatier pellets, with a higher protein content but they are not as popular so I don't feed those very often.
<Indeed. These fish are omnivores, and plant material is a significant part of the diet of most/all barbs in the wild.>
They get smushed up frozen peas, thawed and peeled, every few days which they love. If I find a patch of snail eggs I will knock it off the glass and the female adult barb in particular loves munching on those.
Occasionally I net some mosquito larva from either the pond or the snail tub and these make a popular snack.
<Sure.>
I believe they have eaten some of the Ramshorn snails that were in their tank, there are a growing number of empty shells visible on the bottom, and they definitely rip at the Java moss, Hydrilla, Rotala, and Hydrocotyle plants constantly. I'm pretty sure they ate 90% of the fissidens moss I added too, and almost all of the hair grass is gone too now that I think
about it. I was worried at first that they were doing this because I wasn't feeding them enough but they were still doing it when I tried feeding them twice a day which I decided was too much. I think if they like eating fresh plants then they should be allowed to eat fresh plants so I've been growing more Hydrilla in a tank outside for them since that's the one they stripped to bare stems first of all.
<Indeed. Try floating Indian Fern and Amazon Frogbit, two favourites with many barbs.>
I don't often see the tetra eat, he hangs back while the barbs feed so I always attempt to get a pinch of flake to his part of the tank. He doesn't like me scrutinising him though and moves front on so that he's hard to see. He does get interested in the frozen food and will test and spit out various particles of it until he finds one that he likes, I'm hoping he gets a bit more confidence once his fellow tetras join him, I've been feeding them a small amount of flake daily and they get quite excited at feeding time so I think in a group his instincts will kick in if he sees a lot of feeding action going on around him.
<Tetras are frequently more carnivorous, especially the smaller ones Neons, Penguins, various Hyphessobrycon species and so on. They often enjoy Daphnia and the like. On the other hand, do bear in mind some tetras are much more retiring than Barbs. Put another way, many South American tetras come from blackwater streams with very little productivity. They've evolved to expend as little energy as possible between meals. Barbs typically come from ponds and streams with much more productivity and a lot more for them to eat. They've evolved to be more "busy" and expend their energy in all sorts of foraging and social behaviours. In other words, tetras wait for food to come to them, while barbs seek it out and if necessary push competitors away. Funnily enough, those barbs from blackwater streams (like Pentazona Barbs) are much more like Neons and other tetras in personality.
In any event, if you understand the environment the barb or tetra species come from, cohabiting different species from among them will work better.
Tiger Barbs are bolshy, so mixing with pushy characins like Black Widows makes sense. Rosy Barbs are subtropical to boot, so you'd choose only low-end tropical tetras for life with them, perhaps Buenos Aires Tetras.
Does this make sense?>
I haven't measured my water parameters for a while but for a long time I was getting pH steady at 8 (despite driftwood and almond leafs) ammonia 0, nitrite 0 and nitrate 5-10. I do weekly water changes and fortnightly rinses of the gunk from the filter. I try weekly to vacuum the gravel in the gravelly parts of the tank and skim the surface of the sand in the sandy parts of the tank but I don't know how effective a job I do. I always see gunk being sucked up the tube but everything looks even messier than when I started once I've tipped the new water in.
<Sounds good. Cheers, Neale.>

Tetras with white mouths (and a bit about rosy barbs)    /Neale        3/21/15
Hi Crew,
I'd like to thank you once more for your previous advice, last time I wrote about a suspected case of Ich which is now resolved. I've had no more fish deaths since losing the last of the extra rosy barbs that I bought from the LFS, sadly Pinkie succumbed to his saddle ulcer in the end. I had him quarantined for the last week or so of his time, and whatever he had does not seem to have affected the rest of my fish. I still see the occasional white or clear stringy droppings from the rosy barbs but I am starting to suspect this is a result of them accidentally ingesting sand then excreting it in mucus as there are plenty of green and brown droppings too and they all seem healthy otherwise.
<Smooth silica sand should be fine... but anything abrasive or sharp, like some of the glass-byproduct sands (Tahitian Moon Sand for example) could be risky.>
Currently my 30gal tank has one head and tail light tetra, three adult rosy barbs, and all 16 of the barb offspring (ranging from 1cm to 2.5cm). I'm aware that this will be far too many rosy barbs when they grow up so I'm hoping to find a home for them in the big aquarium at work which currently only has a single small fancy (ugly) goldfish. I'm not sure that this will
be a compatible mix though since even if 5+ barbs are added to keep them well behaved and not nippy, I think they might dominate at feeding time due to being more able-bodied and they might starve out the goldfish. Thoughts?
<It can work, in big tanks with robust Comet-type Goldfish and decent sized schools of Rosy Barbs. But fancy Goldfish are less able to keep out of trouble. It really isn't predictable. Worth trying but keep a Plan B in case it doesn't work out.>
The other option I have in mind is to set up better filtering in the backyard pond and to put some back out there. A lone stray barb fry survived 2 weeks out there during the hottest part of summer, he was too good at hiding and got left behind when I brought the others that had hatched out there inside, so I think the pond does get enough shade to keep the temperature down. Winters here are mild too.
<Rosy Barbs are subtropical and could thrive down to about 15 C, but below that would be risky.>
With the threat of ich and Columnaris gone I have bought four more head and tail light tetras to keep my singleton Mr. Beacon company. I've been trialing different plants in the main tank and do intend to keep it heavily planted (despite the best efforts of the barbs to eat/uproot everything, I've been finding this constant battle part of the fun of keeping fish) so I am hoping the HATL tetras will be happy in the environment. The LFS does not stock these tetras so I bought them online
and besides, I hoped to avoid a known source of diseased fish. When they got here, two of them had white coloured patches on their mouths, and one of them was very sickly, limp and skinny looking. My initial thoughts were that they may have scuffed their mouths against the plastic bag in transit, or gotten feisty with each other since they were all together in the one
small bag, and gotten injured while fighting. The bag wasn't a breather bag and the skinny fish did perk up once out of the bag and in quarantine, he hides a bit but his appetite seems okay and his belly is filling out a bit more; he could have been underfed or oxygen starved maybe but I'm a little suspicious that he could have fish TB or some other disease that could
cause skinniness. I've treated them with Praziquantel so far just in case they were skinny due to worms.
<Fish TB is difficult to diagnose and impossible to treat. It's less contagious and more like an epidemic that breaks out when fish get stressed (diet, poor water quality, lack of oxygen, etc.). So I tend not to worry about Fish TB but instead focus on optimising living conditions for the fish. Usually "mystery deaths" either sort themselves out or else all the vulnerable fish die. Adding medications randomly is a bit hit and miss, and while PraziPro isn't particularly risky, do be careful about medicating
without diagnosis.>
I'm using the tank that the baby fish used to be in, the tetras have been in quarantine for a week now and I think that in two of them the white mark has gotten smaller but noticed today that a third one has a white mouth too. I'm a little worried it could be Columnaris not a wound, or a wound that got infected with Columnaris. I've attached some pictures, and also a picture of one of the friends I got for the false penguin tetra (they have their own tank now due to being too rough!) who has a similar mark. I don't know if it is just that these tetras fight or swim into things a lot; the quarantine tank that the four HATL tetras are in is too small and I know they aren't happy with the amount of space they have. I'm wary of treating
with anything beyond a little bit of salt for now and I'm just hoping after another week or two in quarantine nothing will have worsened and I can get them into the bigger tank. Anyway I just don't have the experience to tell whether these white mouthed fish are injured or diseased or both. Hope you can help.
<Well, the photos look more like fighting damage, perhaps a bit of Finrot or Columnaris thrown in. Another option: swimming into solid objects (like the glass) when alarmed. So for this one turn the lights on more carefully and see what happens. So far as fighting goes, watch your fish, add more of each species to dilute aggression (if an option) and medicate as per Finrot
and Columnaris.>
I did end up getting a RO/filter system which has a mixer tap and a TDS inline meter allowing adjustment for both drinking water and aquarium water. I still don't quite have my head around converting TDS ppm to general hardness degrees - I did read somewhere that dividing ppm by 10 will loosely approximate French degrees but then I don't know whether French or German degrees are more commonly used. I haven't had any further shrimp deaths due to failed moults since I've started using 50-70ppm water for my shrimp tank so it's definitely helping. I'm wondering whether I should still be letting my RO-mix change water stand before I use it; I haven't been, because I thought that it was only necessary to allow time for water treatment chemicals to do their work but is letting water stand useful for other reasons? I have a 20lt plastic jerry can which I store the water in, this doesn't allow much exposure to atmosphere so should this water be agitated? Or just tipped into buckets?
<Bob's a big fan of overnight "resting" of water, ideally with an airstone, but not essential. I'm less fussed, and just avoid changing huge amounts of water. Basically, if you just change 20-25% of the water at a time, and use a water conditioner, you shouldn't need to worry too much about resting the tap water. Freshwater fish are very much more adaptable than marine fish. Think about rain falling into a pond.>
Ok sorry this got to be a lot longer than I originally intended! I really appreciate the time you take with educating new hobbyists like me and reading our rambling emails. I've still got a lot of reading that I want to do regarding Corydoras as I have decided I'd like a biotope tank rather than putting them in the community and making them compete with greedy
barbs, and I think it would be easier to manage water softness and ph if I start again and do things differently in a new tank.
<Possibly. I'm a big fan of sticking with the water chemistry you have, and choosing your fish accordingly. That said, a 50/50 mix of RO water and liquid rock tap water should produce a happy medium that suits most community fish.>
Thanks once again and I hope you have a great day.
Bronwen
<Most welcome. Neale.>
Tetras with white mouths (and a bit about rosy barbs)       3/21/15
Hi again Crew!
Thank you for your replies Bob and Neale. My heart says that I should move the head and tail light tetras into the main tank to give them space and stop them from squabbling or bumping into things, but my head says to give them another week of quarantine to see how their mouth lesions develop.
<Agreed.>
I slept on this idea and this morning while one HATL tetra is still without mouth issues, two of the other three look worse and the white patches seem to be protruding more than they were yesterday. Although, having said that, I did use a brighter light so that I could see them better, maybe the lesions were like that all along and I just didn't see - normally they have half the tank in shade c/o a black plastic garbage bag and the other half lit by a strip of dim LEDs. I don't really think the lesions look fluffy, more so a bit ragged like the edge of some peeled skin in places, and warty in others. However this fluff free finding doesn't relax me at all, as Pinky's back ulcer was never fluffy either and that evolved from a small lesion to a large fatal ulcer over the Christmas/New Year break (I didn't have anything available except topical treatments until it was too late). I
don't really want to give infection a chance to set in again, but I am mindful also that these are different fish, from a different supplier, in a different tank, with different looking lesions that are in a different location on the fish, so I shouldn't expect a similar outcome to last time!
I want to wait a bit longer and observe them tomorrow with the same bright light so that I can get a real idea if there is any progression. I do have tetracycline (Bio-tet) or Metronidazole (generic looking yellow tablets) available now for if the lesions worsen, although I'm not sure if I want to treat all the fish, or only the ones that are showing visible lesions.
<I do think these mouth lesions are either plain vanilla dead tissue from fighting or crashes into solid objects, or else incipient Columnaris.
Either way, treat with a suitable antibiotic, while also review conditions in the tank.>
An observation on a different front, I would be hard pressed right now to pick out which of these fish was the skinny sickly one from a week ago. All of them have good colour and healthy looking bellies now. I am really looking forward to seeing them school together in the big tank once they are done in quarantine! I have discovered that my dad's compost heap has
Whiteworms in it as well as the big pink compost worms so I want to set up a new clean worm culture for some tasty occasional snacks for the fish, which I hope the tetras will like.
<Sounds a great idea.>
Speaking of which, the other fish haven't been eating my Ramshorn snails at all! I found three snails fatally jammed in the filter inlet grille today.
I am guessing as the grille becomes more clogged with plant matter it becomes a tempting place to graze for the snails but the increased suction as they clear a blockage pulls them in to the inlet pipe and traps them there, where they die since their shells can't follow. I have seen snails "hanging around" the inlet pipe before but didn't realise this was happening. The filter pipe has probably been slurping snails out of their shells all along as the barbs seem content to bite their eyestalks off then
go back to ripping at the plants. I've adjusted the sponge that I put over the grille so that only the most suicidal snails will be able to force their way in there, and I will just have to remember to rinse the debris out more often.
<Hmm... some folks would endorse a filter with snail-killing properties...>
I've decided that it will probably be more humane to leave the fancy goldfish in peace in the aquarium at work and to get a nice pond filter going to allow rehoming the excess rosy barbs outside, I probably wouldn't be able to provide adequate supervision to stop any possible mayhem that could occur with the work goldfish. It does get a smidge under 15 deg C here over winter, but the pond should get winter sun.
<Definitely worth trying, I reckon.>
If I can't work something out using either a solar pond cover or something similar to harness solar warmth, I can always bring everyone back inside in a temporary plastic crate for the coldest months.
<Both approaches make sense. Cutting down wind chill in winter with, say, a bamboo cover of some sort might work nicely. On the other hand, bringing in some or all of the Rosy Barbs before the coldest months start can work great, too. Have known many aquarists do this, even in places like Ohio where the summers are nice and hot but the winters rather severe. They had fish that bred prolifically during the summer, but snuggled up indoors for the winter. It's an ideal approach if you're careful, and I found Corydoras for example easily bred this way.>
Thanks again for helping me sort through these problems!
Cheers,
Bronwen
<Cheers, Neale.>