sick bristle nose

Question
I have a 65L tank with undergravel filter. One male siamesee fighter, two baloon mollies, four platties and a bristlenose catfish. I change the water everyweek or so about 20%. Its a well planted tank. All of my fish are happy and healthy, but the last couple of days the bristlenose has soggy looking spots on his tail and fins and a white warty think on his gills. His tail has split in half now. I put a little salt in but dont know what to do now, in case its the wrong thing.

I will take any advise you can give, we love our sucky!

Answer
Hello!

Unfortunetly, there is not much you can do when catfish get parasitic infections.

For example, with other fish you can just add salt. You can never add salt with bristlenoses. Bristlenose and other catfish are scaleless fish. In other words, instead of having protective scales like other fish, they have just skin and cartilage. This makes them VERY suceptible to salt damage. The salt burns away at their skin and can eventually kill them.

I would get your bristlenose out of the tank immediatly. Move him to whatever else you have availble, and then treat the rest of the tank with salt. Your catfish has ich, a VERY, VERY contagious disease that will past on to the rest of the tank. Do 25% water changes every other day for the next little while.

Ich is caused by stress. My guess is he was stressed by the water quality. 20% weekly really isn't enough. You should be doing 50% weekly or 25% twice a week. But that can't be the only factor here, there must be something else that is causing it. Maybe you aren't feeding him enough, or the temperature isn't how he likes it. Maybe the water you are adding during water changes doesn't match the temperature of the tank.

-Nick