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Thread: Oto care advice needed, please!

  1. #1
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    Oto care advice needed, please!

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    Hi there,

    My otocinclus (standard ones) have been dying one by one.

    I started with 12, 5 months ago in July. 1 passed away in quarantine and I experienced no deaths for almost 3 months after. However, for the past 2 months, I've lost 3, one by one. The symptoms are always the same: very skinny stomachs and red, translucent skin. I suspect they're starving to death - but I don't know if the starving is food related or a disease/ailment/poisoning. Those which get these symptoms then die are always the smaller otos, the larger guys are always full-bellied. Oddly, at any one time, most of the otos are full bellied with 1 or 2 skinnier than the rest. And when the skinny one passes, it's almost as though another takes its place.

    For feeding, I provide repashy super green which has no meat and they usually take to it relatively well, although the larger otos and shrimp seem to take it more than the smaller otos. Even when I feed excessive amounts of repashy gel, the smaller otos rarely seem to eat them directly, always hanging out near to the food but not munching directly. Rachel O Leary vouches for Repashy for her hundreds of otos.

    I'm worried about my otos, esp since they're social fish and appear to be more active and happy when there were more of them. Its possible that there'll be a cascade of deaths since they eat more readily when there were more of them.

    Admittedly, I didn't get a good stock of otos, and they were malnourished and had dull colour when I purchased them. I heard that many otos have cyanide poisoning due to the capturing process so I wouldn't be surprised if that contributed to their deaths.

    Brown diatoms are probably the best food but I don't know how to grow and feed it sustainably. Further, it may be Poisoning or a disease causing the deaths. Maybe it's CO2 contributes my CO2 but its 30 ppm maximum.

    If you have any tips, pls do share them! Thanks in advance

    Water parameters:

    Tank size: 15 gal
    Ammonia:0
    Nitrite:0
    Nitrate:10-20ppm
    Gh:6-8dgh
    Kh:4dgh
    pH: 7.4 (w/o CO2)
    Tds: 200
    Temp: 25C (chiller keeps it constant)
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  2. #2
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    Re: Oto care advice needed, please!

    Red visible through translucent parts of the body is often said to be indicative of bacterial infections. I'm not sure. Might just be inflammation brought about by various causes.

    Poor appetite can indicate disease. And small size might be a result of disease, i.e.the big otos are the ones who aren't sick, and therefore feed better, and then grow larger. The ones which were sick always ate less, and therefore stayed small relative to their cohort.

    One fish dying after another is odd - in a group of cichlids, this would be because of dominance/aggression issues (the last guy in the pecking order can die from stress, and then another fish takes its place, etc), but otos don't do it like this. In your case, I speculate it's a non-acute pathogen, maybe internal worms or other parasites.

    If I had to guess, your fish might have some chronic, non-acute disease, probably internal parasites. Wild fish almost always have parasites, and a healthy fish's immune system can keep their numbers under control. Stress gives the parasites an opportunitiy to overwhelm the fish (in my fish, it happens when I miss too many water changes, or they become the target of aggression, etc).

    If you really wanted to treat them, the usual drugs are praziquental for worms/flukes and metronidazole for protozoa (look for products with these active ingredients). It's callous to say this, but new otos are cheaper than meds.

    I might also look into whether there are any stressors that could lead to the fish succumbing to disease, especially the kind of stress that affects one fish at a time. Is a tankmate nipping them? Etc.

    (Caveat: this is just my wild speculation... oftentimes with fish we really have no way to do good diagnoses...)

  3. #3
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    Re: Oto care advice needed, please!

    Quote Originally Posted by Ian View Post
    Water parameters:

    Tank size: 15 gal
    Ammonia:0
    Nitrite:0
    Nitrate:10-20ppm
    Gh:6-8dgh
    Kh:4dgh
    pH: 7.4 (w/o CO2)
    Tds: 200
    Temp: 25C (chiller keeps it constant)
    Your tank could be too small. I have kept them previously in my ADA 60P, but they always die within 6-7 months, no co2, no ferts, ADA soil with Ludwigia. They don't die immediately though but slowly like yours. My friend has a ANS 120M; 4 feet and kept around 8-9 of them in there 2 years back. He uses an arctica chiller, temp is slightly higher than yours at around 27C. So far he has lost 2 of them, but the rest has pretty much grown larger. He has a community tank, so moss only, no ferts, no co2. He feeds them cucumber and NLS algae wafers. By the way, this was in Jun, not sure if any thing has changed since then. His tank also has this green film algae on the back panel and side of the wall which he never cleans. Perhaps stability is the key. Just citing observation.

    You will not have diatoms; brown algae anymore once your tank matures.

  4. #4
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    Re: Oto care advice needed, please!

    hanks for the feedback guys! It may be parasitic or bacterial, but I after talking to some Redditors who specialize in catfish who helped me look at my oto's belly, they said it's possible but unlikely. Thus, I've decided to up my feeding tremendously while also increasing the variety of food - with greater maintainence and WCs. I have found some success so far. If that doesn't work long term, I'll add polyguard then general cure which contains malachite green, metrofurazine and prazi. If that still doesn't work, I'll re-home them.

  5. #5
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    Re: Oto care advice needed, please!

    That's great to hear! Looking forward to hearing how they do in the long term

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