Oranda fancy gold fish with swim bladder problem.

[milocat2012]

I had one of my 2 y.o Orandas lost ability to normally swim due to temperature change in the pond. I took him inside, but after slowly warming up, it was no change: he was floating belly up. Tried to feed him frozen peas but he was not eating and just spitting it out. His fins and belly got burned from being exposed to air for days. After some web research I found some videos of people pull out air out swimming bladder with syringe, so I tried it but unsuccessfully. It looked like i pulled a lot of air, but either the needle on the syringe was not long enough to reach a swim bladder or for some other reason it just didn't work. Then I made him special fish harness using 4 Y type airline connections, airline tubing and a stainless steel nut for buoyancy. Just had to experiment with different sizes of nut to find the one that would work best. Lucky fish fully recovered, all burns healed and it swims normal now after 3 weeks wearing buoyancy harness.
Just made a little video story about it to possibly help other people with the same problem in fancy gold fish. I wish i'd come to this info a few years ago as i had couple other orandas that died a few years back from similar buoyancy loss and it was painful to watch them suffer for long time. I wish i'd known about this type of harness then. This time i did very extensive web search as i wasn't going to let this one go easily. I'm glad i came across this info and maybe it would help others too. Here's the you tube link to the video, as it's too large to just post it on this site. Also a few photos before while wearing a harness and after it recovered.

 

[bettasngoldfish]

Thanks for sharing your story. Glad your Oranda is doing better

 

[Faebinder]

Had a similar problem with one of my orandas. I had to put him out this year. He remained upside down for 4 months inside. I had him on antibiotics for 4 months. Orandas imo are the worst of the worst when it comes to floating problems with water temp fluctuatons. My ranchus, pearlscales, lionhead and bubble eyes are not even close in the frequency. The smaller the body of the oranda with the backfin close to the wen the more likely this will happen. The giant sized orandas don't seem to have this problem (ones that over 6" long).

 

[Riftlake]

There is an article about feeding goldfish to avoid causing swim bladder issues in this month's Goldfish Gazette which you can subscribe to for free here: http://www.about-goldfish.com/swim-bladder-disorder.html

Also worth downloading back issues.

 

[Lisak1]

This is such a heartwarming story! I love it!

 

[milocat2012]

Had a similar problem with one of my orandas. I had to put him out this year. He remained upside down for 4 months inside. I had him on antibiotics for 4 months. Orandas imo are the worst of the worst when it comes to floating problems with water temp fluctuatons. My ranchus, pearlscales, lionhead and bubble eyes are not even close in the frequency. The smaller the body of the oranda with the backfin close to the wen the more likely this will happen. The giant sized orandas don't seem to have this problem (ones that over 6" long).

Yes you're correct that the buoyancy and swimming disorder is very common in orandas. But i disagree that it's only happening to smaller fish. I had opposite experience a 3 other orandas i lost 3 of them back a few years ago due to swimming disorder and all of them were large fish. In fact my very first one died from swimming problem but different then others: he actually wasn't floating up but the opposite, couldn't swim and just was lying on the bottom. I don't really know what caused it, maybe even the fact that he was old: he was about 14-15 years old then and lived all those years in my pond. that oranda was huge more then 10''. If i'd known what i know now about fish harness i'd probably try to make him a harness but instead of weight on the bottom probably would hook up some flotation device on the top. and other 2 i lost due to the same problem as happened to this one. It was no info on the web like it is now on what could be done with this problem. Luckily now i could find quite a bit of info about people making all kinds of different design harnesses and also making operation pulling air from swim bladder. Although this operation didn't work for my fish maybe in the future it would work for other. However this operation is not so easy so i'll probably first always try the harness. But this 2 orandas are both 2 year old and actually largest out of all of my orandas. They're 7-8'' from head to tail. They both lost buoyancy due to temperature change. The first one the biggest red flipped over back in november when temperature drastically dropped. But luckily when i took him inside and water slowly warmed up to about 57, he just started to swim normal by himself. But the other one was fine the whole winter and all of the sudden at the end of february he flipped over, and as i already described that nothing was working for him till i made a harness. I had orandas in the pond for years and they did fine thru winters. Even those 2 were fine thru last winter, however i learned over the years that sometimes it happen to 2 year old fish: it called sleeping sickness: it's when fish completely loosing immunity due to cold temperature and you have to take fish like this inside. It happened a few years back to couple of my 2 year old koi, when they collapsed in the winter, and was just lying on the bottom of the pond. i didn't know that it was then, but decided to take them in, gave them antibiotic injection and kept them in my garage. they recovered as they warmed up and were fine thru 4 winters ever since. It possibly that it's the same happened to those 2 orandas. My other 5 orandas 3 of which are 2 y.o and the other 2 are older made it fine thru the winter. On the photos are the 2 orandas that were sick and fine now, but still keeping them inside because the weather this year is still unusually for our area crazy unstable for this time a year. And the other one is the rest of the orandas that swimming in the pond. I have to keep them separate from the koi, made the inclosure that koi can't get into. I had koi and orandas together in the pond for years and they've always coexisted fine my old timer koi never bothered them, but all of the sudden 2 years ago i added some young smaller koi to the pond and those new comers started to chase all the orandas aggressively and pick on their wens. So i had to separate them. I'm just hoping that maybe those younger koi would already grow up and live the orandas along. Maybe this summer i'll try to let the orandas out from the inclosure and supervise to see what happens and if those 5 now 2 y.o koi maybe calm down and will not attack orandas. Keeping my hopes up, because orandas have been in the inclosure for 2 years now. Would like to see them swimming freely.

 

[Faebinder]

Yes you're correct that the buoyancy and swimming disorder is very common in orandas. But i disagree that it's only happening to smaller fish. I had opposite experience a 3 other orandas i lost 3 of them back a few years ago due to swimming disorder and all of them were large fish. In fact my very first one died from swimming problem but different then others: he actually wasn't floating up but the opposite, couldn't swim and just was lying on the bottom. I don't really know what caused it, maybe even the fact that he was old: he was about 14-15 years old then and lived all those years in my pond. that oranda was huge more then 10''. If i'd known what i know now about fish harness i'd probably try to make him a harness but instead of weight on the bottom probably would hook up some flotation device on the top. and other 2 i lost due to the same problem as happened to this one. It was no info on the web like it is now on what could be done with this problem. Luckily now i could find quite a bit of info about people making all kinds of different design harnesses and also making operation pulling air from swim bladder. Although this operation didn't work for my fish maybe in the future it would work for other. However this operation is not so easy so i'll probably first always try the harness. But this 2 orandas are both 2 year old and actually largest out of all of my orandas. They're 7-8'' from head to tail. They both lost buoyancy due to temperature change. The first one the biggest red flipped over back in november when temperature drastically dropped. But luckily when i took him inside and water slowly warmed up to about 57, he just started to swim normal by himself. But the other one was fine the whole winter and all of the sudden at the end of february he flipped over, and as i already described that nothing was working for him till i made a harness. I had orandas in the pond for years and they did fine thru winters. Even those 2 were fine thru last winter, however i learned over the years that sometimes it happen to 2 year old fish: it called sleeping sickness: it's when fish completely loosing immunity due to cold temperature and you have to take fish like this inside. It happened a few years back to couple of my 2 year old koi, when they collapsed in the winter, and was just lying on the bottom of the pond. i didn't know that it was then, but decided to take them in, gave them antibiotic injection and kept them in my garage. they recovered as they warmed up and were fine thru 4 winters ever since. It possibly that it's the same happened to those 2 orandas. My other 5 orandas 3 of which are 2 y.o and the other 2 are older made it fine thru the winter. On the photos are the 2 orandas that were sick and fine now, but still keeping them inside because the weather this year is still unusually for our area crazy unstable for this time a year. And the other one is the rest of the orandas that swimming in the pond. I have to keep them separate from the koi, made the inclosure that koi can't get into. I had koi and orandas together in the pond for years and they've always coexisted fine my old timer koi never bothered them, but all of the sudden 2 years ago i added some young smaller koi to the pond and those new comers started to chase all the orandas aggressively and pick on their wens. So i had to separate them. I'm just hoping that maybe those younger koi would already grow up and live the orandas along. Maybe this summer i'll try to let the orandas out from the inclosure and supervise to see what happens and if those 5 now 2 y.o koi maybe calm down and will not attack orandas. Keeping my hopes up, because orandas have been in the inclosure for 2 years now. Would like to see them swimming freely.

Yep my theory is that ones with less space between wen and backfin are most likely to have problems like your red one.

 

[milocat2012]

Yep my theory is that ones with less space between wen and backfin are most likely to have problems like your red one.

Not sure If this theory is correct or not, because just by looking at both of them yes you see that the red one has almost no space between the wen and back fin, but he was not the one that had swimming problems. He did flip over due to temperature change, but all i had to do is to take him in and warm him up and he was back to swimming normally a few hours later. But the other calico one the had the swimming problem also from not tolerating cold, but the difference was the just warming him up, along with other things: like antibiotic injections, peace feeding and even pulling air from swim bladder didn't help him to get back to normal. And only buoyancy harness saved him. If if you look that he's actually opposite and has pretty big space between the wen and back fin. So just this isolated incident disproving this theory. I also have 5 other orandas swimming in my pond that never had any king of swimming disorders and 3 out of them have back fins closed to wens.

 

[Faebinder]

I'm not a fish researcher. Its all a theory with the assumption that a longer spine is likely to have a longer swim bladder for better control.