Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Can anyone tell me what this is?

It seems to be like a flap of gunk around the eye. The fish also has white patches on the top and sides of the body around the head area but it doesn't look white when lifted out of the water.





Any help appreciated.

I had one of my barramundi with such a flap on the eye, in my case it looked like the fish damaged his eye and the fluffy flap is just dead skin/body mass. It fell of after a 2 or 3 days and the eye is mostly gone and covered with a layer of skin now. The fish is still swimming in the "Barra retreat", he is just a little bit uncoordinated as expected.

It might be something else in your case, i am not a specialist there, just adding my experience.

Cheers

Oliver

Have you had anything washing into the system. I had some fish with similar systems after a rain

The tank and sump are covered but the growbed does get some rain.

Went out yesterday and found one dead.

Looks like its spread to some of the others now so unless I can work out what it is I may have a few more die

Can anyone take a guess at what I may be? White patches on the body between 5mm - 35mm in diameter (kinda looks like dead skales) and spreads to other fish.

Is there anything I can do to slow it down?

Maybe try to find images and infos for "Ichthyophthirius multifiliis" on the internet and compare it to the signs your fish shows. Just another guess, but what i read of it the parasite is only 1mm white spot, but i heard at the uni that it can lead to loss of scales, so i guess the white spot will be bigger than.

First step of aid would be raising the salinity of the water.

Maybe one of the members who had this before can say more.

Cheers

Thanks for the idea.

I have done a google search and that is not it.

I think I'll try and get some salt today but I don't know what to raise it to? Maybe 3ppt?

Everything more than 3ppt can damage your plants, so maybe go to 2ppt which means you have some safety buffer if you don't calculate/measure right.

yep, shoot for 2 parts per thousand.

Another one dead this afternoon

It seems to have some sort of while slime over its head and some skin damage just behind its head.

Need to get some salt ASAP!

Water salted to 2ppt yesterday.

Another dead one today

This one looked very bad. Still no idea what it is.

So salting up is not solving the issue. It is time to look at other sources of issues too. What kind of media are you using? Are you using rain water? Of so, what kind of roof? Is here ANY metal in your system. Have any pesticides been sprayed near by?

Media is expanded clay balls
A small amount of rain water can enter via the growbed (direct, not run off from a roof)
The tank and sump are covered with marine ply
No chemicals that I know of have been used

It seems to only be affecting the carp. I have some gold fish in the tank and they all seem fine.

You'd need to salt to 3ppt for Ich... but your fish appear to have a (secondary) bacterial/fungal infection...

So you need to salt to 6ppt to have any chance of saving them...

6ppt?

Ok, I'll dose it up today.