Cures for Sick Fish

Freshwater fish, saltwater fish and fish in backyard water features require regular care and maintenance. Keeping your fish tank or pond healthy begins with proper feeding, cleaning and attention to the details of the environment.

  1. Keeping Fish Healthy

    • Adhere to a tank or pond cleaning schedule to ensure minimal environmental fluctuations and test regularly for ammonia and pH levels. Maintain tank equipment such as filters, air lines and thermometers to ensure your fish are living in their appropriate environment. Feed your fish quality food and supplements that include vitamins and minerals. Healthy fish are better able to fight disease.

      Daily visual observation ensures that you can treat illness at an early stage and before it spreads to other fish. Signs of sick fish include color loss, missing scales, black or white spots, blood streaks in the fins, cotton-like growth, irregular movements, or not eating.

    Treating Sick Fish

    • A first-aid kit is your first defense when an illness occurs in your fish tank. The kit should include a hospital fish tank; a chart that lists symptoms, diseases and cures for freshwater, saltwater and scaleless fish; testing kits; medications; stress-reducing products; vitamins; and medicated fish food.

      Fish will fall ill to bacterial infections, internal and external parasites, and fungal infections. Bacterial infections are treated with antibiotics such as Cephalexin, Amoxicillin, Erythromycin and Ampicillin. They are sold under product names such as Maracyn, Furan or MelaFix. A hospital aquarium is important because, just like in humans, you don't want to use an antibiotic on a fish that isn't sick. It also becomes cost prohibitive to treat large fish tanks. With a hospital tank, less medicine is required.

      Clout, General Cure, Metro+ and ParaGuard are products you can use to treat both internal and external parasites. Fungal infections can be treated with Fungus Cure, Furan-2, MarOxy or Triple Sulfa.

    Read Directions and Monitor Tank

    • Read the directions for all medications. Match the dose to the size tank. Check that the medicine will treat the type of tank and fish that you have.

      Diagnosing fish disease is complicated. If you are not seeing results in the length of time recommended by the manufacturer, don't treat beyond the time recommended or increase the dosage amount. Go back to the symptoms chart to check the diagnosis.

      Continue to monitor the tank for additional illness, relocating fish to the hospital tank as necessary. Because fish have less resistance to illness when their environment stresses them, take the time to correct the imbalance in your tank.