Aquaponics - Another sick fish

I have two more fish that are not out of the woods as far as their recovery goes. They are off the bottom, and swimming with the use of one side fin.

This would indicate to me that they are tending to float in an unbalanced way. For some reason when fish get sick, they seem to lose control of their swim bladder.

A swim bladder is an organ in place of the lungs, but fish use it to control their buoyancy by adding or removing air (or some gas of some other kind - I don't know) . This saves them a stack of energy in not having to swim to maintain whatever depth they want.

So a sick fish often shows problems controlling their swim bladder.

I've never noticed it before, but I've also never spent so much time looking for problems with a fish, but it might be an early indicator to a problem when you see a fish using only one of its front fins.

This Could be due to the fish trying to counter a tendency to roll due to not having its buoyancy right.

The swim bladder also aids in stabilization in an upright aspect because it sits above the fishes centre of gravity. By having their floatyest bit at the top, the also get to save energy by not have to fin in order to stay upright. The rest of their body weight acts like a boats keel.

But all that only works if there is just the right amount of floaty in their swim bladder. And I'm guessing that the fin work I'm seeing is as a result of having to adjust for faulty floaties.

If this observation is correct, it might be a useful tool in early detection of a problem.

But I wont ever know if it is correct.

Aquaponics - Sad fish

Whatever it is I did wrong, I did it well.

I have some sad looking fish in my aquaponics system.

The nitrite readings are back to zero as are the ammonia readings, but the aftermath lingers on.

Most of the fish have some degree of scale damage.

And some have what looks like ulcers. I'm hoping it might have been because they were itching against sharp things because the nitrites were acting as a skin irritant, but I don't really know.











The temperatures were high over the last couple of days, and the water temperature got up to around 28 or 29c. That's pretty high water temperatures, even for an Australian native fish.

There were a lot of bugs like dragon flies around the water as I had the door to the grow house open, so It's possible the fish got a lot of natural feed that I didn't know about.

Also I've found a few ants having a bit of a swim in the system.

I found a rotting bok choy, and a rotting bean plant, that may have been contributing to the ammonia load.

Any one of these things, or all of them together may have contributed to the ammonia and nitrite spike, but I suspect I might have accidentally filled their feed jar a second time. Often they haven't eaten their maximum allotment of feed for the day, so the next day I fill the jar to the limit the system can process, and then feed them as much of that as they want over the day. But it's possible I fed them the remainder of the jar in the morning, then refilled it.

All the more reason to get this demand feeder off the bench and into the system.

Aquaponics - Sick fish

I had another fish die this afternoon, and one is in my kitchen in an aerated slightly salted bath, trying to get cured.

It has some fin damage to it's tail and, it has what appears to be mould on its back.

All the water tests report normal, so I'm researching all I can on fish disease. Actually there was a slight spike in nitrites (.25) but I think that was due to the dead fish.

Busy - what I need is a fish expert.

[edit from the future - All these woes ended up being part of an ongoing problem with me poisoning my fish with rainwater run off from a common garden plant which is highly toxic to fish - http://120thingsin20years.blogspot.com/2010/07/aquaponics-poison-plant.html]