Gerald Bassleer examines a fancy goldfish with severe bacterial gill infection and Columnaris. The fish shows white necrotic gills, rapid breathing, and surface gasping. Treatment requires immediate water changes, sea salt at 5 grams per liter, antibacterial medication like neomycin sulfate, and a fucoidan-based food for three to four weeks.
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Dear fish keeper, for those who are keeping pond fish or fancy goldfish, particularly indoor ornamental fancy goldfish, like corandas, are usually kept indoors in your aquarium. They're not so suitable to keep outdoors, as you know. And anyway, this is a fish that is very popular in our aquarium industry. And of course, once in a while I receive these kind of cases where I can enjoy to have to work as a fish doctor to do examinations of fancy goldfish, because fancy goldfish are raised mostly in Asia, so some also in the usa, some also in Israel, particularly mostly in Asia. And here we had a red cap fancy goldfish which had a serious bacterial infection, also some columnaris bacteria. This is my case 107, the fancy goldfish, these red caps here, you see the big tank, you see the dead ones floating. You see some fish hanging at the surface, and they are hanging at the surface and dying. You see they have a serious problem in the gills. You see the gills, how rapid the respiration is. And the gill covers are a little bit open and there are serious losses. And when we pulled out one of those red caps, we could already notice when we lifted the gill cover, we saw necrotic white gills, which is of course a serious damage and the fish will die very quickly. It's like pneumonia for. For mankind, which is a high incidence, risk of mortality, and particularly also for fancy goldfish. And here you see the rotten tissue. All this guilt tissue is necrotic. It's all caused by bacteria. We are destroying the gill lamellae. Here you see it in detail. Here we see some colonies sitting on the side sitting here. Here we see all colonies of columnaris and also other bacteria which are causing this necrotic damaged tissue, destroying the guilt issue, destroying the breathing capacity of the fish. Of course, this is a. A high risk of mortality. So the treatment, first of all, that we have noticed that it's a specific case of gill rot caused by bacteria, no parasites, this case. And the sooner you start treating, the more successful you will be. Because you can see some of the fish were still swimming quickly and some are very bad. The very bad ones, well, you will not be able to save. And the first action you can do in a case like this is do a big water change and the water is already polluted with the bacteria. You can might sort of see some cloudiness in the water. And when you do a big water change, you add 5 grams of sea salt per liter. Why sea salt? Because it stabilizes the ph. Ask your fish doctor for an antibacterial treatment and usually In a case like this, I would propose an antibiotics. It's like neomycin sulfate. Also, at the same time we have a special food or Dr. Basler Biff's food, fuco, which contains fucoidan, which is a help in controlling bacterial infections. So this is an aid biofunctional food and that you should feed at least for 20 to 30 days and leave out no other food. More info you can find on fancy goldfish and Oranda treatments in my two books which are available in different languages. Yes, also in Spanish and France and in German. You can check on my website. And I hope you might become interested to become a specialized fish aquarist, a fish doctor that you can follow at my Patreon and get your training there. So thank you for watching this case on the fancy goldfish and I wish you good luck at the keeping of fish.
