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Is penicilin ok to use with clown loaches? I have heard that some medications are harmfull because clowns have no scales and in the process of treating another fish, I didnt think about whether it was ok for my clowns. Please help.

Edit: The full story:
My johanni has off and on had some sort of parasite, and this morning when I got up he had popeye, so I turned off my filters and put some penicilin in the tank.(not a full dose because I have a 55 gallon tank and didnt have enough) I left for church youth group, and when I came back, all my fish were breathing hard, especially my clown loaches. I then thought it was because the filters werent on, so i removed carbon from one and turned it on. Just a while ago it occured to me that it might have been the pen. treatment that was making the loaches breath hard so i put the carbon back in the filters just to be sure. Other fish= green severum, firemouth, 3 loaches, zebra cichlid, 2 plecos, all seem fine. Please reply

Last edited by fishiedude at 21-Nov-2004 16:37

A hobbyist can go crazy trying to diagnose pop-eye...

The cause can be parasitic or bacterial and can be the beginning of the dreaded Dropsy.

Treatment, which is usually useless unless caught in time, should be done in a hospital tank to prevent undue trauma/stress to other species.

Clown Loaches are sensitive to many antibiotics. For this reason the afflicted species should be separated.

--garyroland.

Ok thanks, I filtered it all out just to be safe, and my johanni looks much better today anyways.

why would you shut the filters off if a fish is sick? if the filtration was off for more then a hr then the majority of the bacteria growing in it would have died off.

yea, turning off the filters was a bad mistake.

First of all, it put your fish through more troubles (not being able to breath, bacteria dieing, so there will be a mini-cycle...etc) Which would stress them out, and they probably couldnt take all of it.

Ya I realized that it was a bad idea afterwards. I shut them off because your supposed to remove carbon from filters, so instead of removing my filter cartridges I just shut the filters off. Everything is back to normal now though, johanni looks fine, so it wasn't a complete disaster, fortunately.