Popeye Part 3

Treatments:

1. Water quality:

As any diseases are always linked to poor water quality or environmental conditions, a good regimen of water change must be practised. If the diseases/popeye is linked to water quality, then I suggest 5 to 10% daily water changes or a 10 to 30% per every 2-3 days is recommended until inflected fish shows signs of improvement, I suggest you should continue for a period of 2 weeks before thinking/doing the next course of actions.

2. Foods:

If the inflected fish is still eating, a oral feedings of foods soaked in selcon or/and another type of liquid vitamin or/and garlic, along with different types of foods mixed  such as fresh, frozen, pellet, etc should be administrated.  Different types of foods have different type of  nutrients/vitamins etc. It will increase its immure system to fight against any diseases.

If the fish is not eating, add liquid vitamin into the tank, the gills will absorb some of the vitamin, although it is not so effective, but at least it is still worth a try to improve the health of the fish.

3. Medicine

The inflected fish can be treated with a broad spectrum topical antibiotic, such as skin absorbed kanamycin sulfate based antibiotics like Aquatronics' Kanacyn or Spectrogram, as well as Neomycin, and Maracyn or Maracyn-Two. Some medicines will effect the biological filter.  

Just a note:

Early intervention or treatments will improve the chances of recovery. Sometimes, the inflected fish does respond to treatment and survives with both eyes blinded, it will most likely perish because it cannot see to locate food and will usually die from starvation, I have one case with my Schooling Bannerfish. that eventually died from starvation, it is very sad to see he died this way as we could not perform Fish euthanasia on it. We also learn a lot from this case.

There are also some cases that the fish ended up with the one popeye that could not be de-swollen, the fish will still survives and grows. I have a case, my sweetlips with one popeye is still eating and growing bigger every days.

Next part (Part 4), I will discuss what I do when my sweetlips has popeye on one of its eyes.