Fish Health Care
Who will help my sick fish?
There are lots of resources available to you if you think you have a sick fish. There are a lot of books that have been written on it with great pictures and great descriptions and also effective medications. Always, the tried and true method is to describe the symptoms or take pictures of the symptoms and come into your local aquarist, your professional aquarist shop. They're also going to have medications there. Keep in mind, they're dealing with fish all day, every day. They've seen everything, so they probably know how to fix anything that you're going to come up with. And then you can go selectively online. Obviously, it's a great resource for a lot of things. The same is true about fish disease and cures for it. There is some disinformation out there, so you have to be careful with that, but if you use one or a combination of all those methods you'll probably find the best solution. Most things are curable, and some things simply aren't. That is true with every animal on the planet.
What are the most common diseases that affect fish?
The most common diseases that fish hobbyists are going to run into, and not in any particular order but probably ranked this way, would be Ich, fin and tail rot, bloat, swim bladder disease and then pop eye or cloudy eye. Those are probably the ones you are going to see more than anything else.
What is a 'hospital' or 'quarantine' tank for fish?
A 'hospital' or 'quarantine' tank is a smaller staging area for your fish tank. It's a place where you put a new fish for observation before introducing it to the population of fish in the main tank. The reason for doing this is to check whether the fish has symptoms of any disease, as we don't want to leave a fish with a communicable disease into a tank that contain a shoal of fish, which might affect them too. In this case, you can isolate the fish by quarantining it, by providing a dose of anti-biotics or pro-bio tics and keep it under close observation.
