Description

Symptoms: bloating of the body, protruding scales.

Abdominal dropsy can have different possible causes, which, though, have the same external appearance. The severe distension of the animal's stomach followed by raised scales and eyes that may bulge are always due to limited or otherwise impaired renal function. Freshwater fish are constantly taking up water in their body from their surroundings, which they must remove again with an expenditure of energy. If their renal function is impaired, water will be retained in their abdominal cavity, thereby causing the aforementioned symptoms.

Dropsy appears to only cause trouble in weakened fish and possibly from unkempt aquarium conditions.

First of all, the aquarium conditions, particularly the essential parameters in terms of water chemistry must be checked. Abdominal dropsy occurs more frequently in animals that come from harder source water and are kept in soft water than vice versa.

As part of the next step, it is absolutely necessary to check and improve water hygiene. The symptoms of abdominal dropsy occur more frequently in tanks with dense animal populations and corresponding feeding coupled with few water changes, and in tanks with permanently few to no water changes. In these cases, the infected animals often recover on their own if the aquarium conditions are improved, provided the damage to the internal organs has not progressed too far. Abdominal dropsy only occurs in rare exceptional cases in tanks with an appropriate animal population and good water hygiene.

A dense fish population results in corresponding excretion along with the repeated occurrence of food remains, both of which are decomposed by bacteria. This means high pressure of infection for the fish, which they have to react to with what may be a permanently strong and increased immune reaction. The immune reaction, though, ultimately constitutes a stress factor that weakens the animals in the long run.

Abdominal dropsy, which is caused by a viral disease, is being mentioned here for the sake of completeness. There is no cure for this notifiable disease. Animals that recover remain carriers for the rest of their lives.

Treatment

The aquarium conditions must be checked and optimised before beginning treatment with a medication. Offer the fish aquarium water that is adapted to their needs, e.g. by adjusting the water parameters. Improve water hygiene by doing larger (min. 30 %) partial water changes and doing these more regularly. You can always support this by using a clarifier with continuous operation.

An effective treatment is to add an antibiotic to the food. With flake food, use about 1% of antibiotic and carefully mix it in. If you keep the fish hungry they should eagerly eat the mixture before the antibiotic dissipates. Antibiotics usually come in 250 mg capsules. If added to 25 grams of flake food, one capsule should be enough to treat dozens of fish. A good antibiotic is chloromycetin (chloramphenicol) or use tetracycline. If you feed your fish frozen foods or chopped foods, try to use the same ratio with mixing. As a last resort add at most 10 mg per liter of water. Also, if unkempt conditions are the suspected cause, correct it.