yesterday

the eggs turned white- all dead (unfertilized). Precious kept fanning and protecting them, Miss Beautiful wanted to eat them- and aggressively drove Precious away so she could do so. Now Shirley is plump and her breeding tube showing, Miss Beautiful's tube is out also. I'm expecting Shirley to lay eggs next, but not sure if she will pair up with one of the others? Last time she laid eggs was with one of the males I removed. Perhaps Miss Beautiful and Precious have a strong enough bond they simply won't allow her to lay eggs.

Precious has a few fin tears from Miss Beautiful chasing her, I think that will heal okay but Shirley has flat white marks on her tail fin that weren't there before. Her lip is the same- a small white blot in center. I didn't do a salt bath yesterday or today- but am still testing the water daily. Nitrates started to get above 10ppm so I did a wc today.

My plan is to do 30% wc twice a week on a regular basis now. Every other wc I either rinse one of the filter sponges or gravel vac the planters, and I made a little chart so I won't forget what I did last time. I'm thinking of making new baskets, to have them all uniform height and a bit less depth- maybe that will help me keep it cleaner. When I bought new food recently, I immediately tossed half the amount of each package, because I know I will only go through about half in six months, and this will easily remind me to buy new food for them again.

Upset because I think they have viral septicemia. I was going to try putting all of them- the three angelfishes and three remaining kuhli loaches- in my 20gal QT and treat with triple sulfa, but that would only help if this is the bacterial form of the disease, and most accounts I read of that say the fishes die very quickly of that, within days. Whereas some can be resistant to the viral form. And there's no cure. So basically I can't add any fish, and have to just give them the best care until they're suffering too much, then euthanize and leave my tank empty for 2 weeks. After that the virus should die out lacking a fish host. If the info I read was correct.

I suspect this is what my two prior paradise fishes had. I don't know for sure, though. I treated the angelfish tank with praziquantel twice before, as I thought the jerky motions and twitchiness Miss Beautiful displayed, was from external parasites irritating her? She only got marginally better though, and the symptoms came back. She sometimes looses color and sits nose up, motionless or drifting, in the middle of the tank. Other times she twitches and darts around like something bit her, or shakes her ventral fins wildly (not the same jerking as when threatening another fish). The other day I saw one of the gold angels jerk the pelvic fins in the same way. And she's for a very long time, often startled and crashed into the walls (though not recently)- I thought she was just nervous, or being bitten by the black skirt tetras- but now I wonder if it was the virus affecting her brain all this time. They all show the red streaks still, which fades sometimes and is more vivid other times.

Sorry if this is repetitive, I've been thinking about it a lot and reading a lot, trying to find symptoms described that match- and viral septicemia seems what it is because of the redness where the fins meet the body, or as if bruises under the skin. It makes me feel very glum. Upset that I adopted fish and put them in this tank which is probably infected, that my beautiful angels suffer, that I gave fish to someone else who might be carrying it. The festivums didn't have symptoms but I did tell the guy who took them, that they'd shared a tank with fish I suspected were ill. And I showed him the angels, pointing out the symptoms and telling him my suspicions. He didn't seem too concerned, said he'd keep them in their own tank if he needed to. But now I feel like it would be have better had I just euthanized them instead.