Please Help - Apparently Sick Dwarf Gourami.

Hi,
I have had a male dwarf gourami for the past 1 year. He has always been aggressive and active, rarely hiding. I noticed that a few days back, he stopped eating and is lethargic. He has a swollen belly and I am having a hard time figuring out if he has just eaten a lot, constipated, bloated or has some disease like dropsy. Please see the attached pictures.

I have a fully stocked 29 gal low tech planted tank with the following parameters - Amm 0, Nitrite 0, Nitrate < 10, Temp varies from 76-79F, pH 7.4.

Side Notes: I have always fed my fishes a mix of frozen bloodworm, tetra super color flakes or occasionally blanched peas. I always feed once a day and there is one day in a week when I starve them. The newest additions to my tank have been 4 otto cats (~ 1 month) and I have been feeding them blanched zucchini. The dwarf gourami have been voraciously gorging on those zucchinis too for the past 2 weeks and now this happened. Can overfeeding on zucchinis cause something like this to happen?

Thank you.

 

I would take a week off from feeding the fish and do a minor water change as well.

Sometimes fasting helps a lot for fish. especially when they are aggressive and just eat off of everybody's plates.

 

Your fish is fat.
You need to fast him for a couple of days but I don't know how you are going to do that in a community tank. My small community tank with a DG requires me to feed the cories at night and take the snails out to feed them. These things are eating machines.

 

Thank you all. I am so glad to know he is just fat. I have already started the fasting period since yesterday and will continue for a week. The tank has enough algae for the otto cats for a week, the rest are healthy so I am not too worried about.

 

Fish can go weeks w/o food.