scales turning black

what u blokes think

[Beerman]

Bro ,what happen??????

think it jumped cos the wounds suggested impact
not sure abt the dropsy-like symptoms though....

anyway, i have added half the reccommended dosage of aquamedi multicure for arowanas just to play safe and as a preventive measure.

so far the aros are doing well in the hospital tank. the more serious aro hasnt really got much appetite but the latter has been gulping down food as usual.

any other advices from medics here?

Darkening of the scales can be due to bruising from traumatic injury. Darkening such as yours, could also occur due to dehydration. Excessive salt in water can cause dehydration leading to a bruising effect of the scales. Check your salinity levels. Hope this helps.

Those scales does look nasty. Just wonder how the aro can get so badly affected. Hope it recover soon.

Originally posted by Vetduck
Darkening of the scales can be due to bruising from traumatic injury. Darkening such as yours, could also occur due to dehydration. Excessive salt in water can cause dehydration leading to a bruising effect of the scales. Check your salinity levels. Hope this helps.

does the brusing effect comes with protruding scales?

what most llikely is the cause when they appear together?

Originally posted by Vil
does the brusing effect comes with protruding scales?

what most llikely is the cause when they appear together?

I'm not sure if dehydration would cause scales to protrude as well. When my aro had the problem with dehydration & bruising, the scales did look somewhat protruding. It recovered as soon as I lowered the salinity.

Have you been putting salt in your tank?

[Hobbit6003]

Hi Vil,

The bruising looks quite bad. Yeah, it looks like deheiscence of the scales, which like what vetduck had said, could be due to high concentration of salt. It sure doesn't look like dropsy to me.

However, recently, there are a few aros had turned out this way a few days after a waterchange. When was the last time you performed a water change, and what amount was changed? It may have something got to do with addtitives in our tap water. What was the pH of your tapwater? A pH of more than 8.0 seems to point to addition of chemicals like chloramine, which requires a high pH to stabilise in the water. Any behavioural change you have noticed? Any signs of heavier breathing?

If your aro is still active and feeding, then you may want to start treating the fish for possible secondary bacterial infection. Melafix or the Jap Yellow Powder looks like a good bet.

Try to pre-filter your tapwater with activated carbon as a preventive measure the next time round. I passed mine during water change through the defunct cannister filter filled with AC, and the flow rate into the tank is adjusted to give me about 200L/hr or less. Now, I test the pH of the tapwater prior to water change, and recently my tapwater has returned back to 7.0-7.1 in pH.

Cheers,

Kenny

the tank was already running for a while now. no water changes were made after these 2 aros were introduced into the tank.

the symptoms only appeared 3-4 days later.

currently, both of them had cut down on feeding, not too sure but its due to the effects of the medication. How long can they go without food? these are 5-6 inches aros?
but they are swimming ok.

maybe you are right about the burning effect, i did add salt beforehand... but for the first aro, mostly suspect it jumped cos there are scales missing when i first saw what happened, hard to believe anything besides jumping would cause the scales to come out in a quick time??

the protrusion also seems to be going down, what is obvious now is the dark patches on the scales.

the tapwater ph is quite high but currently, any water changes are treated with antichlorine/amines.

i have uploaded some picts in greater details

aromedics pls help

thanks very much

http://www.arofanatics.com/members/vil/scaleproblem/