scamp

Hello All,
I'm new to Fishlore and have a problem I was hoping to find a solution for. I have a sick female black swordtail. I've had her about 3 to 4 weeks and she came with a black male who is doing fine. Almost from the beginning she began to lose coloring. At first this was quite pretty as she began to show metallic looking turquoise highlights, but now she is extremely pale looking almost white with a purple hue here and there. This color extreme happened within the last two days.

Anyway, I was hoping to breed the pair I had because they are really beautiful, but no luck. So I purchased 2 more black females to give him the happy harem most male fish desire. Well, that was on this past Friday and today as I said that first female was almost white. She does seem listless but I can't see any other problems. She ignores the male and other femaless and will float near the top of the tank or hide in the artificial beach hut where my pleco lives. Can anyone think of what this may be? Besides the color change and listlessness, I don't see any other symptoms to mention. I am also concerned that what she has will be transmitted to the new females and the male. This morning I didn't have time to remove her to a temporary tank, but was not sure it would do any good anyway.

It would be such a shame to lose her, or the whole crew. I did a water change on Friday before adding the new females and made sure the conditions of the water were great with a ph of 7.1, nitrates around 50 if I average the reading of the test strip and no nitrites. What should be a first step to protect and help her and the tank in general.

Thanks in advance!

Shawnie

hi scamp ..welcome to fishlore!
Id do an immediate water change of at least 50% ..those nitrates are way too high and should be under 20...make sure you treat your water with prime if it has cholorine etc in it...think about gettin an api liquid master test kit as many have suggested the strips arent reliable....goodluck

edit...did you check the ammonia reading also?

scamp

Hi Shawnie,
The chlorine levels are at zero according to the test strips and for that at least I think they are reliable. You see, I have tested the tap water itself I use to fill the tanks and gotten a positive reaction so I think a negative reaction should be reliable. I use stress coat and stress zyme to treat the water and also a ph adjuster to keep the ph at just over 7. The ammonia again was according to the test strips being at the lowest reading. I suppose I should get a liquid test kit to better monitor the levels more precisely. Thanks for the tips. I'll dig in and do a water change when I get home.

scamp

After going home I noticed that the female was looking a bit darker again, but still not entirely black as she was initially. Also, I made a mistake on the nitrate levels of the tanks. They are between 0 and 20 according to the test strips I have used, and that is for all the tanks, since my last water changes which were on last Friday. The initial numbers I wrote down were from another set of tests I was remembering, not the fish tanks. Anyway, the water is fine and in the correct range for all of the normally quoted parameters that I see discussed on the site.

I still don't know what to do for her if it is not the water. I'll just keep a watch on her and the others for now. I would not want to treat with anything that may be more dangerous to them just for the sake of seeing if it helps her when I don't know what exactly is wrong in the first place. I think I will keep checking the other threads too to see if anyone else happened to have something similar occur.