Freshwater

Treatment: Fast your fish for two days. Improve poor or fouled water conditions
caused by uneaten, rotting food before it leads to more disease problems.
If your fish are beginning to resemble the Goodyear blimp and are
bobbing up and down in the water like corks, start measuring each serving of
food so that you don’t feed them too much at one time (see Chapter 10 for
more).
Frightened fish
Symptoms: Your fish dash for cover when the aquarium lights are first turned
on; constant physical injures from collisions with decorations.
Cause: Sudden changes in lighting, quick human movements, people rapping
on the glass, and pets trying to get into the tank.
Treatment: Gradually increase room lighting by opening drapes and turning
on lamps before you switch on the aquarium lights.
Home Remedy: Salt Bath
Chapter 11: Diseases and Treatments
Here’s a good home remedy that you can try to avoid giving your fish large
doses of medications. This method works really well and can save you a lot of
money.
A salt bath as a method of treating freshwater fish has been around since the
aquarium hobby first began. Salt baths have proved effective over time to
help cure problems such as fungus infestations, ich, and several other types
of parasites such as gill flukes. Basically what happens is the parasites are
submerged in the salt solution along with your fish and begin to take on
water until they burst and fall off.
We have used this home-remedy method for more than 20 years and have
found that it has a very high rate of success in treating different types of diseases.
(Don’t try this in your home bathtub with your own sores, or you may
end up peeling yourself off the ceiling — you’ve heard of salt in an open
wound? Not good for nonfish.)
A salt bath is really very simple. All you have to do is add one teaspoon of
table salt for each 5 gallons of water in your hospital tank. Continue adding 1
teaspoon of salt twice a day for the first five or six days. If the infected fish is
not completely well by the sixth day, continue to add one teaspoon of salt for
another three days.
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