mollies belly up

Question
I have a 10 gal tropical tank stocked with 2 sm irredescent sharks, 3 balloon mollies, 1 lyrie tail molly, 2 platy's, 2 feather fin tetras, 1 kuli loach, 1 chinease algae eater, and 1 rainbow tetra. I know my tank
is full but I keep it clean and usually have had no problems. I don't plan on keeping the sharks in it for very long. but initially treated the tank with furan-2 when i added them to help prevent ick. They seemed
fine. then i noticed my lyrie tail molly getting velvet disease. I treated with general cure for a full treatment. didn't see any improvement. then treated with velvet guard. and since then I have only seen a decline in my balloon mollies and the lyrie tail worsen. my one balloon
molly started swimming in a spiral pattern and seemed to want to be belly up. I started to look for treatment for internal parasites due to possible swim bladder problems. I came across coppersafe but read that it harms plants. not wanting to kill my plants, i only added a few drops in
hopes that it would help a bit. the mollies resumed to normal in a day but then belly up again. so i took out all plants and did a full treatment of coppersafe. 5 days later no improvement. my white mollies are becoming a dark gray, assuming due to the stress. I did notice that one
balloon molly is starting to puff out it's scales. there are a few black specks on him as well. can you help me to save them?

Answer
Hi Lori,
Sounds like your mollies are suffering from some pretty bad illnesses. Unfortunately they are likely responding to poor water quality, stress of the disease itself, and the medications. Sometimes adding too many medications back to back can do serious harm to fish, unless you did a large water change or two between the two different treatments. Poor water quality can result from the medication destroying the beneficial bacterial colonies and as a result, ammonia builds up and all sorts of trouble happens.


First off, we really need to figure out what we really should be treating for. So your mollies have velvet currently? What would probably help is warm temperatures and plenty of large daily water changes.
Actually, according to my research, it appears that Furan-2 leans more towards treating bacterial infections rather than parasites.
Coppersafe should work for the Velvet just fine. Be sure to just stick to one medication and never mix them. If you have to switch to a different medication do a large 50% or more water change or two and then treat. Be sure you have all carbon removed out of your filter also, (as you probably know) this is because carbon will absorb medications.

The best I can recommend is to-
*Raise the temperature to about 85F
*Use the coppersafe
*Increase the aeration (warmer temps and meds lower the oxygen content of the water. Making sure your filter is running efficiently and adding an airstone or two helps)
*I would probably do about 90% (draining the water and leaving just enough for the fish to swim around) water changes every-to every other day and redosing with Coppersafe. Water changes are vital for fish and especially when they are sick. Even if medication labels say not to, water changes are actually very beneficial. They remove loads of excess parasites and help reduce some of the stress on your fish by keeping the water cleaner and fresher.

With these steps I hope your fish recover. They may be too far gone now. Velvet attacks fast and hard sometimes and it can almost suffocate fish if it gets into their gills heavily.

The molly you described with the puffed out scales makes me worry he may be developing dropsy...Which could in fact be a secondary infection stemming from the velvet. Dropsy is very hard to treat. I hope none of your other fish develop this. The best you could do for the balloon molly with the puffed scales is to isolate him in a quarantine tank (even a 2gal would do) with a bubbler/aerator. You could try feeding him anti-bacterial food, doing daily massive water changes, and trying epsom salt (I believe an 1/8 teaspoon per 5gallons) to relieve the swelling. Even with the best of care most fish with dropsy just never make it.

I hope you can get everything straightened out and your fish happy again.

Only my very best wishes,
Karen~