Sudden onset of mystery illness - Please help!

[LionCalie]

Thank you for the help, Sakura.

He has kept a good appetite and has become significantly more active.
His fins are still clamped tight and color is off though.

[Sakura8]

I'm glad to hear he's become more active. It takes a while to knock out velvet. It's a hard one because the cyst stage is resistant to chemical treatment. So you can kill the adults but you have to wait for the babies to grow up before the treatment will work. Hang in there!

[LionCalie]

He seems to be feeling better. He is active again and even made a bubble nest, his first one since he's been here. What a weirdo. Anyway, I'm not feeling too confident that this is Velvet after seeing one with a really bad case at Petco. Right now he is in a hospital tank, in a dark bathroom, 82 F water and no salt. Still using coppersafe.

Something I noticed (which may be the real problem or related to the coppersafe?) is his gills are very red and seem to be sticking out more than normal? When he takes air at the surface of the water his gills actually make a noise, which is odd.



This picture shows the stuff on his face, which I'm unsure if it's related to the illness or just him developing more color. He is a Marble, after all.

[Sakura8]

Hmm. His gills do look quite inflamed. Normally I'd suspect gill flukes but the Coppersafe should take care of that if he does have them. My next suspicion would be ammonia poisoning but if it is that, it's leftover scar tissue from past ammonia poisoning that he suffered before you got him. It looks like he may have some gill hyperplasia because of that scar tissue or inflammation and that's what's causing the gills to stick out. Epsom salt can help reduce the swelling but most of the time, gill hyperplasia is permanent. He should be okay but he'll have to breathe from the surface more often.

[Fleetwood]

I'm glad to see he's doing better. Yes, his gills look quite inflamed, but I, too, think he'll be fine. [: