hey all, yesterday i posted my biggest koi had some green stuff on him. Hoping it was algae. Fishing said it probably was Saprolegnia. I believe he is correct. today i noticed my smaller female is loaded with it, not green but white. I am in a total panic. they will not eat. My water has zero everything, ph is 7.5. i had to do a major water change 5 days ago due to a cave in. should i treat the whole pond? i was going to give my biggest a salt bath, remove the fuzz with peroxide and some proform( if i could find it) but this looks like it wouldn't fix the water should i change the water again? thanks
emergency
- Thread starter onemean
- Start date
fishin4cars
True friends just call me Larkin
Actually from what I have read they don't recommend changing the water. Why? I really don't know except that in one reading I read it was mentioned that the most common time for this to breakout is early spring when the filters are starting back up and the pond is trying to become more stable. I wonder if it is triggered by a cleaning the filters or a chemical reaction to the slime coating. Have you tried googling the name I gave you? May try that and see if you can get any additional information on the fungus.
koidaddy
karps house of koi
Man that sucks. Im sending some good vibes your way onemean.
j.w
I Love my Goldies
- Joined
- Feb 1, 2010
- Messages
- 34,122
- Reaction score
- 21,010
- Location
- Arlington, Washington
- Showcase(s):
- 1
- Hardiness Zone
- USDA 8a
- Country
That's sad onemean, hope things go better for you soon :regular_waving_emot
koidaddy
karps house of koi
Hang in there. I feel you pain. I lost 30 koi 3 years ago, due to leaving the hose on all night. I feel I let them down. Yours might just be nature taking its coarse if that helps.
Go to this page and see if this helps.
http://drdaveskoi.tripod.com/html/remedies.html
There is also a link to the Univ of Florida that has more information on this page.
http://drdaveskoi.tripod.com/html/remedies.html
There is also a link to the Univ of Florida that has more information on this page.
koidaddy
karps house of koi
Great link DrDave. Uf is a great school. My daughter is in the nursing program there.
When fish are not looking well or if they have a fungus it is normally due to poor water conditions, especially in the early spring when the immune systems of our fish are still a little dormant and can't fight off any minor infections or parasites. The first thing I do in the spring is to make a one third water change from the bottom of the pond where toxins congregate.
I think refill the pond and add a conditioner if required and then add salt to the pond at 10 pounds per 1,000 gallons or 1 pound per 100 gallons. You can go higher than that but that's what I normally tell people to start off with to see if that will be enough.
If water conditons remain poor, no amount of medication or salt will heal your fish but if you have good filtration and add the salt, in no time you will see a difference in your fish.
A lady brought over a bunch of fish last year that had so many ulcers on them and it was due to her bio-filter which was an upflow and was causing the water to go bad after a while and she also had stones/gravel at the bottom of the pond
I normally innoculate with Baytril but I thought I would try using just salt in a pond with good water quality and within a week I could notice a difference in the sores on these fish.
In about a months' time, the sores were pretty much healed and the fish were doing great and now they are back home.
Yours Koily, Lorraine
I think refill the pond and add a conditioner if required and then add salt to the pond at 10 pounds per 1,000 gallons or 1 pound per 100 gallons. You can go higher than that but that's what I normally tell people to start off with to see if that will be enough.
If water conditons remain poor, no amount of medication or salt will heal your fish but if you have good filtration and add the salt, in no time you will see a difference in your fish.
A lady brought over a bunch of fish last year that had so many ulcers on them and it was due to her bio-filter which was an upflow and was causing the water to go bad after a while and she also had stones/gravel at the bottom of the pond
I normally innoculate with Baytril but I thought I would try using just salt in a pond with good water quality and within a week I could notice a difference in the sores on these fish.
In about a months' time, the sores were pretty much healed and the fish were doing great and now they are back home.
Yours Koily, Lorraine
How was it determined that an upflow bio filter caused the water to go bad? Is there any scientific evidence to support that claim?
I am a huge advocate of salt as a treatment, that said, I have always heard that ulcers are not curable, are you saying salt will cure these?
I am a huge advocate of salt as a treatment, that said, I have always heard that ulcers are not curable, are you saying salt will cure these?
fishin4cars
True friends just call me Larkin
I can say without a doubt baytril and salt will treat a Ulcer, I have done this twice, both fish are still in the pond, Now that being said, One of the two has a spot I'm watching now that is getting close to being in need of treating. Same spot as before but the last time it was over a year ago. I also have seen something else that comes and goes at the same time, in the infected area, the fins appear to get a fin fungus on them. The ulcer clears and then the fins clear and they grow back.
Now I know my water conditions are what I want them to be or very close. Upflow filters could cause problems if they become clogged. I can agree with that but a upflow filter in itself is not the problem.
Now I know my water conditions are what I want them to be or very close. Upflow filters could cause problems if they become clogged. I can agree with that but a upflow filter in itself is not the problem.
Hi Fish and Dave, it's wonderful to meet the two of you. Yes, there is a big difference in upflow and downflow bio-filters, depending on how they are made.
We used to have 14 ponds where we bred Koi and Orandas. Our Koi breeding stock were imported from Niigata Japan and our Orandas were brought in from China and Singapore.
Our ponds were always either green or had hair algae. In 1982, we had no idea that we had to filter our ponds until they started to spawn and that's when the trouble started. Thankfully we made water changes every week because the ponds were so heavily stocked with fry. The upflow filters we used had lava rock as a bio-media and in the beginning they worked just great. In time though, the water would again turn either green or the hair algae would continue to grow although with the hair algae the water was always crystal clear.
Because I was so new to filtration at that time I had no idea that you had to either backwash your bio-filters or in our case, just dump them because we didn't have bottom drains and it was the only way to clean the lava rock. When I first started to dump the filters, I noticed that the bottom one third of lava rock was covered in this slimmy sludge. I did some reading and called some friends in the States because here in Canada, no one had any idea on how to get rid of these algaes and what the heck was causing it.
I was then told and I believe it even now that the reason why the water continued to have trouble with algae was due to the excess nutrients/toxins in the water which were being removed by the algae.
You can just imagine how much water I used to clean these filters because I knew that the sludge had to be removed from the lava rock because any good bacteria that had been started on the lava rock was being starved of oxygen and food by the algae.
A friend of mine found a picture in a book or on the net of this downflow bio-filter and when we started to use that it was like a miracle. The 13,000 gallon pond that we had was always green and the only time we saw our Koi was when we would bring them inside for the winter.
So, Hubby and a good friend of ours started to build this 300 gallon bio-filter for the big pond because a good reason for the water being so green besides the fact that we didn't have the right bio-filter and we needed something larger for the big pond was the fact that we had 60 Koi in that pond ranging in size from about 6 inches to just over two feet and, at that time, the only food that could be purchased for our Koi was trout chow. You do the math. LOL LOL
So, we build the new filter and Hubby did something very smart by using a swimming pool pump to draw water from the bottom of the pond through a 6 inch pipe that had a bunch of holes in it. This worked very well and then the water started to clear. I was almost in tears.
The other thing that I noticed about the downflow bio-filter that we use is the fact that the bio-media we use never gets dirty. There is fine particulate around the medium but when we backwashed the big pond with a 4 inch bottom drain, most of that particulate was removed.
The other thing is that the downfilter we use is not like a trickle filter, I found that they worked very well also but we found that we had to clean the lid at the top of the filter that was full of holes so often due to the build up of algae from the pond.
This filter collects debris from the bottom of the pond to the top of the filter where it is trapped in window screening, keeping the plastic scrubbies that we use clean of the sludge. There is a pipe on the inside of the filter, raised up from the bottom about 4 inches, which fills with water as the filter fills with water and then draws this water back up to the top of the filter and out to the pond.
I'm sorry that I've gone on so long but when I think of all the years we had such trouble with algae and once we started using this filter it made my work on the filters so much less than it was. It used to take me a good part of the day to clean all the lava rock with the upflow and with the downflow, I just open a bottom drain or lift the scrubbies (bio-media) up with window screening so that I can put the pump into the filter and drain it and then replace everything.
Hope this makes sense to you.
Your's Koily, Lorraine
We used to have 14 ponds where we bred Koi and Orandas. Our Koi breeding stock were imported from Niigata Japan and our Orandas were brought in from China and Singapore.
Our ponds were always either green or had hair algae. In 1982, we had no idea that we had to filter our ponds until they started to spawn and that's when the trouble started. Thankfully we made water changes every week because the ponds were so heavily stocked with fry. The upflow filters we used had lava rock as a bio-media and in the beginning they worked just great. In time though, the water would again turn either green or the hair algae would continue to grow although with the hair algae the water was always crystal clear.
Because I was so new to filtration at that time I had no idea that you had to either backwash your bio-filters or in our case, just dump them because we didn't have bottom drains and it was the only way to clean the lava rock. When I first started to dump the filters, I noticed that the bottom one third of lava rock was covered in this slimmy sludge. I did some reading and called some friends in the States because here in Canada, no one had any idea on how to get rid of these algaes and what the heck was causing it.
I was then told and I believe it even now that the reason why the water continued to have trouble with algae was due to the excess nutrients/toxins in the water which were being removed by the algae.
You can just imagine how much water I used to clean these filters because I knew that the sludge had to be removed from the lava rock because any good bacteria that had been started on the lava rock was being starved of oxygen and food by the algae.
A friend of mine found a picture in a book or on the net of this downflow bio-filter and when we started to use that it was like a miracle. The 13,000 gallon pond that we had was always green and the only time we saw our Koi was when we would bring them inside for the winter.
So, Hubby and a good friend of ours started to build this 300 gallon bio-filter for the big pond because a good reason for the water being so green besides the fact that we didn't have the right bio-filter and we needed something larger for the big pond was the fact that we had 60 Koi in that pond ranging in size from about 6 inches to just over two feet and, at that time, the only food that could be purchased for our Koi was trout chow. You do the math.
LOL LOLSo, we build the new filter and Hubby did something very smart by using a swimming pool pump to draw water from the bottom of the pond through a 6 inch pipe that had a bunch of holes in it. This worked very well and then the water started to clear. I was almost in tears.
The other thing that I noticed about the downflow bio-filter that we use is the fact that the bio-media we use never gets dirty. There is fine particulate around the medium but when we backwashed the big pond with a 4 inch bottom drain, most of that particulate was removed.
The other thing is that the downfilter we use is not like a trickle filter, I found that they worked very well also but we found that we had to clean the lid at the top of the filter that was full of holes so often due to the build up of algae from the pond.
This filter collects debris from the bottom of the pond to the top of the filter where it is trapped in window screening, keeping the plastic scrubbies that we use clean of the sludge. There is a pipe on the inside of the filter, raised up from the bottom about 4 inches, which fills with water as the filter fills with water and then draws this water back up to the top of the filter and out to the pond.
I'm sorry that I've gone on so long but when I think of all the years we had such trouble with algae and once we started using this filter it made my work on the filters so much less than it was. It used to take me a good part of the day to clean all the lava rock with the upflow and with the downflow, I just open a bottom drain or lift the scrubbies (bio-media) up with window screening so that I can put the pump into the filter and drain it and then replace everything.
Hope this makes sense to you.
Your's Koily, Lorraine
Also, was for the ulcers, they are very easily cured witha shot of Baytril and salt as Fish said but I've found that if the water quality is good, the ulcers can also be cured with just salt and the best water quality. That way the immune system of the fish is strong enough to fight off the infection to heal itself. If the water is bad, no amount of salt or any type of medication will heal any fish because the reason for the infections is due to the conditions of the water.
Your's Koily, Lorraine
Your's Koily, Lorraine