Rainbowfish Mailing List Archive: Re: [RML] Myco inquiry

I took a quick look on Aquabid and I didn't see anyone/handle or otherwise named Terry selling rainbowfish. Tanner, Rarefish at lax has good, uncrossed fish. He also lists a large variety of rainbowfish so you can find just about anything you need. Buy enough and you can just request a airport to airport shipment to lower your shipping costs. Whatever you do make sure you pick up some M. parvas and G. doryity (Jaiguim variety) as they are very nice and fairly new fish.

Mycobacterium problems. Myco is everywhere, it's in the dealers tank. If your dealer brings in anything from the far east he also has the ability to carry on the disease. The East's sloppy and crowded breeding and raising habits plus the overuse of antibiotics has created fish that you should really watch and quarantine for a long time. You'll see TB in tetras and livebearers too, not just rainbowfish so if you are cutting out bows you better avoid these too. I haven't heard of it hitting large central american cichlids so you could always keep those in your heavily planted tanks :-) Wouldn't that be fun!

It's how you manage Myco which will determine whether your tank will get hit or not. If you have fish with active infections then there is a <chance> that you can get it. If you're immuno-compromised then I wouldn't keep a fishtank. Otherwise you really don't have a problem if you don't work in your tank with a lot of open cuts and such. If you avoid active fish infections you keep these odds to a minimum. You have a much better chance of being involved in a car accident or getting lung cancer if you smoke than you have of getting fish TB. When you're thru with playing in your tank, don't forget to wash your hands with soap and water, something you should be doing anyway.

Avoiding fish TB in your tanks. There has been a lot of misinformation on the subject of TB and rainbowfish, on this list and elsewhere. It seems that he who shouts the loudest gets heard the most on the internet and sometimes on this mail list. If you want to take that advice go ahead, but you'd be better off letting those cichlids munch on your plants instead. I think that someone like myself who has been constantly keeping rainbowfish for 20 plus years now, now at 80+ tanks, I probably have a little bit more experience with the subject and how to avoid TB or how to control TB.

First of all, guarantine any fish that you want to add to your tank for about 30 days. Even fish that seem clean could develop TB due to the stress in shipping. I think I would also wash any plants well and put them in a quarantine tank for at least a week. I know sometimes that it's difficult to set up a Q tank that will keep plants alive w/o causing algae problems. Delicate plants can sometimes have a lot of problems. That's a start but not necessarily the end to avoid TB in the first place. Once you have the fish in place you need to avoid the "stressors of rainbows". Stress factors (no particular order) include: #1 Too high of a temperature - keep it under 82, 77-79 is great. #2 Avoid pH swings - don't overuse CO2 in the planted tank. If you have a low buffering capacity (< 3KH) then buffer your water with bicarb or something if you want to use CO2. Keep your CO2 in a moderate range instead of adding the maximum amount. Bows use a lot of O2 and if you really push it
you can stress them. Remember the higher the temp, the more O2 needed to keep the same amount of mass swimming forward. #3 and really the most important: perform Quality water changes. The editor of TFH has a nifty little talk that he does on water changes. Just going thru the math with his Excell tables shows that really anything less than a 50% water change will eventually lead to the buildup of waste and "stuff" in the aquarium. We can measure some of that "stuff" like nitrates, which are bad for bows. My "scientific" observation for this is when my pH is fine and everything else seems fine but my nitrates are high my fish don't seem as happy or healthy. When I drop that nitrate load with several back to back large water changes then they are much healthier and happier. You don't have to observe that too many times to know that the quality of life for the fish has improved. There may be other factors and other unmeasureable waste buildups that we can't measure easily
that also stress them. You know almost every stream I saw in New Guinea and even the two trips I made to Australia, the water was free flowing and the fish were getting 1,000 % + water changes per minute! Now we, who have been keeping bows for awhile know that aussie fish seem a tad more resistant to TB than the NG fish. Maybe that's because there is a more constant water flow in the NG streams and those fish are less able to cope with the stress of poor water quality. I think it's hilarious that people try to promote "natural" as a method where they perform little or no water changes when mother nature herself performs massive water changes that few of us could or ever want to duplicate.

I do keep rainbowfish in a large (7' - 210 gallon) planted, highly lit (3 watts/gallon PC) + CO2 tank. I do have active growth on my Rotala macrandra and my Didiplis diandra so my tank actively grows reasonably difficult plants and isn't just a monoculture of Val, amazon swords and java fern. When you hear about people performing less than optimal water changes and claiming great results, ask and see if they actually grow any difficult plants or whether their methods merely promote the growth of the "weedy" plants. I do add Seachem's phosphate, and N and potassium and Tropica Master Grow to put on a real show of plant growth. Even w/o over doing the CO2 my plants do give off a lot of O2 and the fish are healthy. By avoiding stress factors your rainbowfish can naturally resist any myco that they might come in contact with. To break down a tank, bleach and clean tank and gravel to remove myco is really just wishful thinking. You eventually have to add back plants and other
fish. You can avoid sick fish or potential TB carrying plant (on the surface of the leaves, not implying that the bacterium is growing on the plant) but you can never know for sure. So avoid stressing the fish and you'll avoid TB.

Gary Lange

Hi All – I have a general question about myco in rainbows. I’m setting up a heavily-planted 180 gallon tank and would love to stock it with rainbows, but I must admit to some degree of apprehension because of the recent chatter about this deadly disease. In short, I’ll have my hands in the tank quite a bit for pruning so I don’t want to be exposed to the disease myself, and I don’t want to invest considerable money in the fish if the scenario is that if one gets it, the rest are likely to die. Also, the prospects of having to tear the tank apart and bleach it after I’ve worked so hard to get it into order are not welcome. Any thoughts? FWIW, I was considering getting my fish from Terry (aquabid).

Visit your group "r_m_l" on the web.

To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
r_m_l-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
--0-882797926-1126033112=:61013
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Mycobacterium problems. Myco is everywhere, it's in the dealers tank. If your dealer brings in anything from the far east he also has the ability to carry on the disease. The East's sloppy and crowded breeding and raising habits plus the overuse of antibiotics has created fish that you should really watch and quarantine for a long time. You'll see TB in tetras and livebearers too, not just rainbowfish so if you are cutting out bows you better avoid these too. I haven't heard of it hitting large central american cichlids so you could always keep those in your heavily planted tanks :-) Wouldn't that be fun!

It's how you manage Myco which will determine whether your tank will get hit or not. If you have fish with active infections then there is a <chance> that you can get it. If you're immuno-compromised then I wouldn't keep a fishtank. Otherwise you really don't have a problem if you don't work in your tank with a lot of open cuts and such. If you avoid active fish infections you keep these odds to a minimum. You have a much better chance of being involved in a car accident or getting lung cancer if you smoke than you have of getting fish TB. When you're thru with playing in your tank, don't forget to wash your hands with soap and water, something you should be doing anyway.

Avoiding fish TB in your tanks. There has been a lot of misinformation on the subject of TB and rainbowfish, on this list and elsewhere. It seems that he who shouts the loudest gets heard the most on the internet and sometimes on this mail list. If you want to take that advice go ahead, but you'd be better off letting those cichlids munch on your plants instead. I think that someone like myself who has been constantly keeping rainbowfish for 20 plus years now, now at 80+ tanks, I probably have a little bit more experience with the subject and how to avoid TB or how to control TB.

First of all, guarantine any fish that you want to add to your tank for about 30 days. Even fish that seem clean could develop TB due to the stress in shipping. I think I would also wash any plants well and put them in a quarantine tank for at least a week. I know sometimes that it's difficult to set up a Q tank that will keep plants alive w/o causing algae problems. Delicate plants can sometimes have a lot of problems. That's a start but not necessarily the end to avoid TB in the first place. Once you have the fish in place you need to avoid the "stressors of rainbows". Stress factors (no particular order) include: #1 Too high of a temperature - keep it under 82, 77-79 is great. #2 Avoid pH swings - don't overuse CO2 in the planted tank. If you have a low buffering capacity (< 3KH) then buffer your water with bicarb or something if you want to use CO2. Keep your CO2 in a moderate range instead of adding the maximum amount. Bows use a lot of O2 and if you really push it you can stress them. Remember the higher the temp, the more O2 needed to keep the same amount of mass swimming forward. #3 and really the most important: perform Quality water changes. The editor of TFH has a nifty little talk that he does on water changes. Just going thru the math with his Excell tables shows that really anything less than a 50% water change will eventually lead to the buildup of waste and "stuff" in the aquarium. We can measure some of that "stuff" like nitrates, which are bad for bows. My "scientific" observation for this is when my pH is fine and everything else seems fine but my nitrates are high my fish don't seem as happy or healthy. When I drop that nitrate load with several back to back large water changes then they are much healthier and happier. You don't have to observe that too many times to know that the quality of life for the fish has improved. There may be other factors and other unmeasureable waste buildups that we can't measure easily that also stress them. You know almost every stream I saw in New Guinea and even the two trips I made to Australia, the water was free flowing and the fish were getting 1,000 % + water changes per minute! Now we, who have been keeping bows for awhile know that aussie fish seem a tad more resistant to TB than the NG fish. Maybe that's because there is a more constant water flow in the NG streams and those fish are less able to cope with the stress of poor water quality. I think it's hilarious that people try to promote "natural" as a method where they perform little or no water changes when mother nature herself performs massive water changes that few of us could or ever want to duplicate.

I do keep rainbowfish in a large (7' - 210 gallon) planted, highly lit (3 watts/gallon PC) + CO2 tank. I do have active growth on my Rotala macrandra and my Didiplis diandra so my tank actively grows reasonably difficult plants and isn't just a monoculture of Val, amazon swords and java fern. When you hear about people performing less than optimal water changes and claiming great results, ask and see if they actually grow any difficult plants or whether their methods merely promote the growth of the "weedy" plants. I do add Seachem's phosphate, and N and potassium and Tropica Master Grow to put on a real show of plant growth. Even w/o over doing the CO2 my plants do give off a lot of O2 and the fish are healthy. By avoiding stress factors your rainbowfish can naturally resist any myco that they might come in contact with. To break down a tank, bleach and clean tank and gravel to remove myco is really just wishful thinking. You eventually have to add back plants and other fish. You can avoid sick fish or potential TB carrying plant (on the surface of the leaves, not implying that the bacterium is growing on the plant) but you can never know for sure. So avoid stressing the fish and you'll avoid TB.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com --0-882797926-1126033112=:61013--