What should I do

[liz26914]

Housing
What size is your tank? 3 gal critter keeper
What temperature is your tank? 79
Does your tank have a filter? yes. azoo palm filter
Does your tank have an air stone or other type of aeration? no
Is your tank heated? yes
What tank mates does your betta fish live with? none

Food
What type of food do you feed your betta fish? aquean betta pellets but will be switching to nls
How often do you feed your betta fish? 5 pellets a day. I try to space them out by a couple hours

Maintenance
How often do you perform a water change? once a week
What percentage of the water do you change when you perform a water change? 10%
What type of additives do you add to the water when you perform a water change? API tapwater conditioner

Water Parameters:
Have you tested your water? If so, what are the following parameters?
No, but I did a 100% water change last night
Ammonia:
Nitrite:
Nitrate:
pH:
Hardness:
Alkalinity:

Symptoms and Treatment
How has your betta fish's appearance changed? maybe bloated stomach
How has your betta fish's behavior changed? lethargic, only moving when being fed. floating on his side. no bubble nests
When did you start noticing the symptoms? the lethargy and no bubble nests have been going on for about a year and the floating on his side started a month ago
Have you started treating your fish? If so, how? when the symptoms first started I treated him with aquarisol, prazi-pro and levimisole and when the floating on his side started I fed him peas and did a epsom salt treatment
Does your fish have any history of being ill? he sometimes got fungus on his fins
How old is your fish (approximately)? i got him from petco a little bit more than a year ago so maybe 1 1/2.

My first year of college I was feeling lonely so I decided to get a betta fish. I got a 10 gal tank and a sponge filter and went to petco to pickup a betta. I ended with a mostly blue some red, crowntail betta that I later named Okeanos.
A couple weeks later, I thought that the 10 gal was really roomy with only 1 fish so I decided to go out and get some guppies. On my way to petco I decided to stop by walmart. Stupidly, I ended up buying fish from Walmart. Shockingly (sarcasm), the fish were sick.
I don't know all the diseases that the fish had but I know that one of the guppies had columnaris bc of the worm sticking out of its butt. I ended up putting the walmart fish out of their misery. But I was hoping that Okeanos ended up ok. He started acting lethargic when I got the fish but wasn't showing any other symptoms so i assumed that he was acting like that because he ddnt like the walmart fish.

I was freaking out. I first tried coppersafe bc I thought it was ick bc one of the fish was scratching itself against the gravel. It didn't help. then i got some aquarisol and that didn't work. When I realized that it was an internal parasite from the worm in the butt of the guppy, i got some prazi-pro. It ddn't do anything. So I did some more research about the worm comming out of the butt and found out it could be columnaris. So I got some levamisole and treated my betta for that. It didn't help. after the 3 day treatment, he didn't poop out any worms so I didn't bother doing another one a 3 weeks later like was supposed to.
I wasn't sure what else I could do so I went online and tried to do more research. I found this website where you pay like 30$ and you can ask a vetinarian about a problem with your pet. I did it. The vetinarian told me that I shouldn't worry, he was probably fine and I should just leave him alone. So I did. None of the lethary went away and I don't think I have seen a bubble nest in awhile but I didn't think anything of it.
So its been about a year since that freak out. about a month ago he started having trouble swimming to the bottom of his tank and started floating on his side like dead fish. I fed him peas and that didn't work so I put him in 4 cup measuring cup and put 1/4 tsp of epsome salt for a few days. It helped. he pooped and stopped floating on his side. So last night I put him back into his tank after 100% water change. Well today, he started floating on his side again. now i'm worried that because he has parasites from the walmart fish, he is getting swim bladders. I don't know what I'm suppose to do. Peas don't work and he can't constantly be in epsom salt water, can he? and none of the medications work. am i making him suffer, by keeping him alive? I don't know what to do!

[liz26914]

anything would be helpful

[aemaki09]

Have you tried maracyn plus, furan 2, or kanacyn?
i think any of those 3 would be worth a shot, 2 rounds of each, and if that doesnt help then maybe its time to think about euthanazia

[callistra]

NLS is good - feed 5-8 a day (6 seems to be good for most of my boys) with one fast day a week.

Please prefilter the intake tube for safety. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_no...efilter+sponge

A 3 gallon is hard to cycle. It can take up to 2 months and never really fully establish.. best case scenario is it needs 2 50% changes a week, one needs to include a thorough vaccuming of the gravel to remove poop, or use the stir dip method (stir up poop out of the gravel and use a cup to scoop it out).

I'd say you have a water quality problem and also overmedicated. If you don't feed peas right they can cause issues as well.

What color is his poop?

Remove the meds. Do 1 tsp per gallon (predissolved and added slowly over an hour of epsom salts - pure 100% magnesium sulfate per ingredients label. No additives of any kind are very important.

Share photos.

[Shewbert]

You stated that he is bloated (a photo will help) get a cooked and shelled pea, dip it in pure cod liver oil, the capsules pierced will do just the same.
feed him half of the pea in the morning and other half at night for 3 days, but do not feed him anything else for this period.
When the 3 days have passed, when you feed him with pellets, soak 2 of his pellets in the oil for another 7 days.
Cod liver oil is kinder to the betta than clove oil, they sometimes refuse clove, it does the same job of helping to cure bloated and ill swimming fish.
Hope this helps
Mandy Marine Biologist/Vet

[liz26914]

Originally Posted by callistra

NLS is good - feed 5-8 a day (6 seems to be good for most of my boys) with one fast day a week.

Please prefilter the intake tube for safety. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_no...efilter+sponge

A 3 gallon is hard to cycle. It can take up to 2 months and never really fully establish.. best case scenario is it needs 2 50% changes a week, one needs to include a thorough vaccuming of the gravel to remove poop, or use the stir dip method (stir up poop out of the gravel and use a cup to scoop it out).

I'd say you have a water quality problem and also overmedicated. If you don't feed peas right they can cause issues as well.

What color is his poop?

Remove the meds. Do 1 tsp per gallon (predissolved and added slowly over an hour of epsom salts - pure 100% magnesium sulfate per ingredients label. No additives of any kind are very important.

Share photos.

will order a prefilter.
His poop is the normal brown color.
I think it is a bacterial infection bc i put kanamycin, which is the active ingredient in kanacyn and it helped a lot. he is no longer floating on his side, no lethargy and his stomach is less bloated. he actually came out from behind the intake valve of the filter to watch me get ready this morning.
Don't worry about the kanamycin. I'm not randomly putting chemicals into my fish's tank. Following the treatment directions from the seller.
-25% water change everyday and 1 scoop of kanamycin from the scoop. (very small scoop. smaller than 1/8tsp) the seller gave me for every 2 1/2 gal every day.
-10-30 day treatment


I have the filter off because when he was floating on his side, the filter current seemed to stress him out.

[liz26914]

Originally Posted by Shewbert

You stated that he is bloated (a photo will help) get a cooked and shelled pea, dip it in pure cod liver oil, the capsules pierced will do just the same.
feed him half of the pea in the morning and other half at night for 3 days, but do not feed him anything else for this period.
When the 3 days have passed, when you feed him with pellets, soak 2 of his pellets in the oil for another 7 days.
Cod liver oil is kinder to the betta than clove oil, they sometimes refuse clove, it does the same job of helping to cure bloated and ill swimming fish.
Hope this helps
Mandy Marine Biologist/Vet

doesn't clove oil knock them out?

[liz26914]

thanks for the responses. I was freaking out when i created this thread. was really scared that i was going to euthanize him. almost broke down crying.

[callistra]

At high doses, clove oil is used for euthanasia. Otherwise it's used for general anesthesia. I have never heard of it being used for constipation :S

[liz26914]

he seems to have some fungus on his fins. is it safe to put pimafix into the water when kanamycin is also in there?