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upikabu

Yep, you pretty much echoed my experience with cardinals. They definitely pick up infection very quickly once moved. When the LFS gets them from the supplier they lose a ton and then they are moved again which creates stress and infection to both the new and existing cardinals. I'm thinking of buying a uv sterlizer to see if that would help.

My Scapes

I bought 6 cardinals from a Major Chained Petstore and all of my cardinals died.... I think part of it was my car ride home, I took me longer to get home than usual that night, due to traffic and such. They all got ich within a few hours and died within 48 hours. I treated them with ich meds immediately and they still all died. I do not think they were in RO water, but no matter what I did they just didn't get any better at all! I think people need to handle the cardinals better at these stores too. I hope you have much better luck with yours. I decided to go back to the neons. I bought 4 neons, I have 2 all ready, I acclimated them extra long and they are doing fine so far. They look pretty good as a matter of fact! Hopefully I will have better luck with these...



Christina

Could be. Most shops add something such as Blackwater Extract to their RO, to help stabilize pH and add minerals or whatever to the water. The water is still very different from, say, your tap water. Even if you have the same pH, kH, gH, and everything else as the store water, there's a difference in trace elements, nutrients, and pathogens.

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And when he gets to Heaven, to Saint Peter he will tell: "One more Marine reporting, Sir! I've served my time in Hell."

Well, I'm down to six cardinals, one died over nite. So over the course of 4 days I lost 40% of the school of 10. I'm pretty sure a big reason for their demise was the fact that these fish were kept in RO water at the supplier. Once in my tank they are exposed to pathogens, etc that they are not equipped to deal with. This would make sense since within hours they seem to get infections and die a few hours after that. Many of the cards that died lost color on the back half of the bodies and at least one got had a white cottony growth almost develop before my eyes. All my other fish seem fine, even 2 rummynoses that I acclimated at the same time as the cardinals. So I think I learned never to buy fish that were in RO water.

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I think your right Sirbooks. I guess the stress of acclimating brings it out cause they looked good in the store. The LFS also told me that their supplier keeps discus, cardinals and neons in RO water. Stop me if I'm wrong, but this probably adds to the problem for acclimating because now they are exposed to things their bodies aren't used to.

Last edited by tetratech at 13-Nov-2005 09:18

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Looks and sounds like the neon tetra disease to me then. This thing spreads fast and can wipe out an entire population of fish in a tank. It is also supposedly untreatable.

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And when he gets to Heaven, to Saint Peter he will tell: "One more Marine reporting, Sir! I've served my time in Hell."

All the cardinals are schooling, except the one that gets this discoloration at the base of the tail. Here's a pic, sorry for the bad quality.



tetratech attached this image:


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I know many beginner and advanced aquarists have trouble acclimating Cardinal Tetras. I myself had a school of 12 for over a year without a single lose, but to acclimate them and keep them alive past the first few weeks is another story. I recently purchased a school of 10 and this is the events thus far.

11/10/05- Purchased 10 Cardinals for $18.00
11/10/05 – Drip acclimated for 3.5 hours
11/11/05 – All 10 make it thru first 24 hrs
11/12/05 – Two died, I noticed they lost coloration on the tail and stopped schooling.
11/13/05 – Another one has lost color on tail, not schooling

It almost sounds like NTD, but supposely cardinals are immune to this. Did anyone else experience this or know what it is. The discoloration eventually extends to about half way up the body and then the fish dies pretty rapidly.


My Scapes

Sorry to hear about your cardinals. I just had a bad experience with cardinal purchase myself last week. I had 7 cardinals that I bought from a store where they had been there for over 6 months. No problems with them whatsoever in my tank. Until one month later I got 5 more cardinals from another LFS that claimed they had been there for a month. They all look fine after 24 hours, but after 48 hours I found 3 of them dead within an hour of each other (no visible signs of infection). A day later another one died. 2 days later one of the original 7 died (tail missing). So now, a week later, I'm back to 7 cardinals (6 original, 1 new).

Definitely won't be buying more cardinals until I'm sure they've been there for ages. One LFS told me they haven't seen a good batch of cardinals in a while. It's gotten to a point where they've stopped buying cardinals from importers since they've lost more than they've sold.

-P

As I mentioned many fish stores don't even bother with cards anymore, they simply can't stop their demise. I've lost 5 now from my original 10 over 4 days. I'm thinking about investing in a uv sterilizer if I do want to keep a large school. This might help keep the water clean of certain pathogens that might infect them.



My Scapes

Discoloration does make it sound like neon tetra disease, which cardinal tetras are actually not immune to. They're just less likely to carry it, but are certainly susceptible. Are none of the tetras schooling together, or just the ones that are falling ill? Whenever I have seen tetras with NTD, they break away from the school and often have trouble swimming.

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And when he gets to Heaven, to Saint Peter he will tell: "One more Marine reporting, Sir! I've served my time in Hell."

Hmmm. I never had problems with mine, but then again I had bought them about a year ago from a healthy shipment. It may well be that the quality is going down, because I've noticed deaths in new, more recent batches of cardinal tetras. Nine months ago this was an unusual thing for me.

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And when he gets to Heaven, to Saint Peter he will tell: "One more Marine reporting, Sir! I've served my time in Hell."

It's Day 6 since I purchased 10 cardinals from my LFS that stated they were kept in RO at the supplier. 5 of them died within the first 4 days, 2 dying a day later with discoloration. The remaining 5 seem fine and look healthy. I actually purchased an additional 4 cardinals from another LFS and all four are fine thus far. I know it's not scientific, but I do feel that if these fish are being housed in RO water and they go to regular tap they will not be able to defend themselves against certain bacteria, etc.

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Hmm, interesting.

Here in the UK, my LFS has few if any problems with Cardinals. But then my LFS made a policy decision to avoid obtaining stocks of certain species if he knew that they were bred in Singapore, because of numerous problems encountered with Singapore-bred fish. He'll only sell local bred specimens of certain fishes such as Guppies and Angels, won't touch Singapore-bred Rummy-Noses, and although I'm not sure of the provenance of his Cardinals, thus far the only trouble I've had with my Cardinals bought from him over the years was the disaster 6 weeks ago when the local water company flushed excess treatment chemicals into the supply and I lost half my fish including my star breeding female Panda Corys and all my Lemons. Prior to that incident I'd had Cardinals without trouble for 10 years, virtually all losses prior to that point being from old age.

As if to reinforce the point, my surviving fishes (including my last surviving Cardinal - sometime I'll get him some playmates) are frolicking quite happily after the latest water change (hopefully free of aluminium sulphate this time!).


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Wow, I wish I lived in the UK because cardinals are one of my favorites. Here cardinals are one of the hardiest fish to acclimate past the first few weeks. Many LFS don't even stock them because they lose so many after getting them from their suppliers. Many of the LFS employees readily admit this to me when I look for them. But for me there's nothing like a big school of them. Sorry to hear about your fish lose with the contaminated water supply. I guess when you keep fish long enough something like that is bound to happen.

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I went to the LFS the other night and I noticed that the cardinals in one of the tanks was losing his blue streak jsut like you guys have been talking about. All of his blue had disappeared and it was kind of red.

I think his problem was mostly from stress though because they had so many fish in this tank with them, I think they had jsut gotten fish in that day or soemthing.


Christina

Rarely are there ever survivors from an infected batch. Its kill ratio is near 100%. Its the presence of the sporazoan that causes the issue, fish kept in RO water will retain a lot of hereditary immunity. Its probably the fact that a lot of neons and cardinals are horribly managed for disease resistance multigenerationally, and terribly inbred that causes the problems with low immune systems. An RO unit will remove a lot of the useful compounds in blackwater extract anyway.Blackwater is at absolute best only a mild preventative anyway.High levels of NTD sporazoans will infect fish irrelevant of the presence of blackwater.I strongly suspect huge numbers of shops are taking to the "use blackwater and youll be fine- we do" approach as some sort of excuse for not tracking the disease back to suppliers or stripping down their own tank and filter systems. Its just not good enough, and you cant trust their word. THEY have NO defence against NTD. NO-ONE does. ONLY quarantine works.

Hate to be the arbitor of doom and gloom but id probably euthanise the whole batch, strip down the tank and start again.

DEFINITELY quarantine all new tetras in your area for at least 8 weeks. That shop alone could be the source of hundreds of infections. A lot of the filter systems that shops use are linked, and this means every tank in the shop will now have NTD sporazoans in them.You cant afford to not quarantine fish from that shop or others in that immediate area as their returns of unwanted fish will mean that a huge number of local stockists will probably now be carrying the disease. Barbs and other fish can act as carriers and some can die of the infections themselves. If you have a community that these tetras were in you should basically consider it unfit for tetras and barbs from now on for at least several months.


When you see definite symptoms of NTD in a tetra you should immediately euthanise that fish, since successful curative techniques are nil at the moment. You should also immediately quarantine all susceptible species ( unless of course all of your fish are susceptible species , in which case you might as well treat them in situ.) and treat with antibiotics, antifungals and maybe metronidazole. The treatment will of course fail to save any tetra from NTD but it will save other fish infected by other bacterial infections that cause similar symptoms. It wont save your fish from NTD but it will stop the infection spreading elsewhere and its a precautionary measure to stop you from euthanising all your fish if the cause of sickness isnt NTD.

The few fish that may survive an infection of NTD should probably be saved and bred from, with the intention of creating a strain of NTD resistant tetra, but obviously sick fish could still infest other non resistant fish,so these breeding efforts should be made in quarantine conditions, preferably even laboratory conditions. This obviously would be beyond the scope of most hobbyists, and attempting to breed such fish yourself might mean that you are simply spreading the disease yourself unless you have or can get networked with some serious laboratory researchers. A disease restant strain would have to be managed properly with a genetically variable selection of tetras from different areas and populations. Amateur attempts to breed such tetras and their release into the hobby prematurely might mean that such tetras would effectively replace most tetras in the hobby, but this could come at the enormous cost of lack of genetic variability, massively reduced lifespans and deformity, not to mention eventual breeding depression.

In the absence of a cure, you MUST manage your fish with strict quarantine , and take every effort to prevent the spread of the disease. This means informing fellow keepers of its presence, and unfortunately euthanising sick fish asap.NTD is not as yet considered a pandemic disease, but that could easily change if people fail to perform good quarantine. Hopefully , vets, breeders, goverment bodies , and the petkeeping community will come up with something that includes preventative measures for the future but until then quarantine is all you can do.

Sucks doesnt it? But thats the situation.



Last edited by longhairedgit at 28-Nov-2005 03:53

Update on my tetras. I have so far purchased three batches for a total of 16 cardinals.

11/10/05 - 10
11/16/05 - 4
11/23/05 - 2

From these 16 I currently have 10 healthy ones. I know at least 5 died in the first batch within the first few days of acclimation. After the third batch was added I lost one more a few days later after it lost some color. Since than all have looked good. The first batch survivors are approaching their first month in my tank. So far the survival rate is about 60%. If I base it on at least 10 days of survival.





My Scapes

tetratech,

If it is any comfort at all, I lost 7 out of 13 Otos, means a survival rate of less than 50%.

Sorry, and good luck with the remaining ones .

Ingo

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Proud Member of the New Jersey Aquatic Gardeners Club

Thanks LF!

It's interesting how the same fish do well and other's do not in different members tanks. Alot of people have problems with otos. I haven't lost any of the seven that I put in my tank. I think I once mentioned this that I had an oto for over a year in a 5 gallon, no heater tank and it is now one of my 7 in the 72. Maybe you would do good with cardinals. Also other than the one rummy that died when my tank was only about 2 weeks old the other's I have are very solid.

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