My daughter’s goldfish has developed what looks like fresh road rash on its side. The area is about 3/8 of an inch in diameter. Does anyone now what this may be? Is there anything that can be done, or is the fish going to take that long swim with the Tiddy-Bowl man?
Simple solution:
Get a cat. Daughter loves kitty, kitty eats fishy, kitty is happy, after a day or so daughter forgets fishy, and the Ty-D-Bowl man goes hungry (never trusted that perv anyway).
Flush 'em.
Well, it sounds like your fish may have ick. (At least that’s what my mother calls it. She manages a pet store.) It comes from having too much bacteria in the water. A pet store should have the necessary medicine. It’s in liquid form, and you just pour a little into the water. It’s worth a shot.
Tell me you don’t have that fish in a bowl with no filter. Goldfishies need a filter, they are such dirty, ammonia-producing creatures.
Try this pond forum. These people are knowledgeable and very helpful. Most will likely reccomend a salt treatment.
K.
There are several possible infections that it could be. If the goldfish is living in a stagnant goldfish bowl, then get it out of there and into a real tank that is filtered & aerated. If it is a real tank, then change the water more often & buy some medication from the pet shop (droplets that are added to the water). Check a fish-care book to see what kind of infection it is.
What Phobos said. Also, there are several different things it could be (don’t know quite what “road rash” is).
White spots is “ick”. Clean the water, clean the tank, is your tank overcrowded? Get a hang-on-the-back power filter at Wal-Mart (not one of those air bubble carbon-and-floss things, which are useless with goldfish), put the ick medicine in, maybe add some salt (1 teaspoon of **non-**iodized salt per gallon of water).
A red hole in the side of the fish is furunculosis, and unless you’ve had the fish a really long time and have spent a lot of money on it, you’re better off throwing it away. You cure furunculosis by adding methylene blue to the water, raising the temperature to 82 degrees with an aquarium heater, and praying.
How to humanely kill a goldfish: Freeze it. Put it in a big Tupperware (1 pint at least) with some water, put the lid on (so the fish, alarmed by the steadily dropping water temperature, doesn’t try to jump out, which means digging around in the bottom of the freezer to find it, try explaining THAT to the paramedics when the freezer lid slams shut on your head), and put the whole thing in the freezer. Fishie goes to sleep. Permanently.
Wait until the thing is definitely frozen solid (I’ve had goldfish revive and survive at the skin-of-ice-on-top stage, which was awkward to say the least). Then thaw it out in the sink and throw the fish in the trash (or have a big funeral, it’s your call).
It’s not ich, so don’t treat for ich as described above. Ich is a protozoan that, in one stage of its lifecycle, is visible as tiny white granules peppered evenly over the surface of the fish, and for some reason rarely appears on a fish kept alone in a bowl.
Since you have a goldfish in just a bowl, I doubt you’re willing to invest in the filtered tank that would indeed improve its life, so recommending that to you is probably impractical, though I do of course second the recommendation.
In lieu of that, there’s not much you can do, but there is a little, and it might or might not work.
The “road rash” you describe is probably either a bacterial infection or a reaction to the buildup of waste chemicals in the water. Both can be alleviated somewhat in the same way: begin doing a series of partial water changes. The closer in temperature the clean water is to the existing bowl water, the less it will further stress the fish. So get a clean container of water, add a little de-chlorinator (about half the recommended dosage: goldfish are not very sensitive to chlorine, and it might have a prophylactic effect on the bacteria), and let the water sit for at least an hour in the same spot as the bowl to equalize the temperature.
Remove about a third of the water in the bowl. Ideally, use a narrow hose to siphon it from the bottom, so you’ll be removing detritus with the water. Replace it with the clean water. Do this twice a day for a while. The more frequently you do it, the more you can gradually increase the percentage of new water to old, as the fish becomes acclimated to the chemistry of the clean water.
A salt dip is a bit more complicated, but unless the fish is too far gone will help a great deal. Wait till you’ve done quite a few water changes so the bowl water is chemically very close to clean, fresh water. Then–
- Have three containers: the bowl with the fish in it, another to mix the salt dip in (at least half a gallon), and a third with clean fresh water for the fish to end up in at the end of the assembly line.
- Dissolve 1/2 cup of NON-IODIZED salt per gallon of water in the middle container.
- Net the fish, without any bowl water, into the salt dip. (Dip the net, too, or have a second, sterile net.) The fish will react violently; may roll onto its side, etc. Leave it in for at least 10-15 seconds, and up to minute if it doesn’t react as violently.
- Net the fish with a clean or salt-dipped net into the clean water.
- Scrub out the bowl with NON-IODIZED salt as a scouring agent. Rinse well. Dump the fish–gently–back into the bowl.
If you have gravel on the bottom of the bowl, this will contribute to problems. Each little piece of gravel is surface area for bacteria to grow on; they just love those anaerobic nooks and crannies.
Feed bowled goldfish only every 2nd or 3rd day. And only a flake or two at a time; goldfish-specific pellets are better; sinking pellets are better than floating pellets (goldfish tend to gulp air when they eat at the surface, which can lead to other problems; they are, by habit, bottom feeders). Remember that, in general, a fish’s stomach is only as big as its eyeball, and you should only feed it as much as it can eat in one meal. Never give it extra for later; it’ll just mess up your water quality.
From now on, do your partial water changes as often as you can, but at least once a week. A partial water change is like opening a window and letting in some fresh air. Do it twice a day if you want. Hell, if you did it hourly the gold fish would grow to a couple pounds in a year.