temp. for fin rot

[acadialover]

Wondering what the ideal temp is for fin rot ? Is it a bacterial infection, or fungal? Is it always poor water quality ? How does one know when it is going away ?
Thanks

[deso]

Temperature should be around 80 degrees Fahrenheit. It's a bacterial infection, but if it gets bad enough, secondary fungal infections can follow. It's typically brought on by poor water quality, stress, or excessive temperature variations. You can tell that it's being cured when the red/black colouration begins to disappear and new, clear-ish growth starts to show on the fins.

edit: forgot to mention that the most important thing here is that the water quality is kept pristine during recovery.

[Aus]

Fin rot is very often caused by flexibacter.. the same critter that manifests as columnaris, so it's a sort mild/early version of that disease.

Columnaris can exist in cold water (goldfish get it too) but it really likes high temperatures, 76 and above, and it moves pretty fast in a tropical tank. So raising the temp on a fish with fin rot/skin or fin fuzzies/breathing issues/septicemia/open sores and other symptoms of that bacteria isn't always a great idea. Fin rot can be caused by other things as well, but as columnaris can be very fast moving indeed (I lost a fish to the slow version..), I personally don't like to take chances.

Higher heat works with ich, because the ich parasite hates heat above 83 or so, but it can make a columnaris infection speed up. 78 is an acceptable heat for bettas, so I try to keep my hospital tank at around that for anything that looks like a bacterial problem, just to be safe. That's just how I do things, I'm not saying it's THE thing to do. But slightly lower temps seem a good idea to me, when a common cause of it flourishes in 76 F and above.

[Laki]

I think clean water is more important that water temp for curing fin rot ... I could be wrong but it's seems more effective!

[Aus]

It sure is! I was kind of taking that as a given.. probably should have mentioned it anyway!!!

Fin rot isn't 'caused' by ammonia as such, and even fish in clean tanks can get it from another fish -- the bacteria actually likes clean, aerated water over dirty pee-water.

But dirty water, with ammonia in it, causes weakness in the fish's slime coat, damage to gills and eyes and organs -- and fin-- so that when the bacteria happen along, as they do in most tanks, they latch onto the fish as a likely host through that damage and off they go...

You know it's getting better when it stops rotting the fins away and you can see re-growth.