Question by Amberlicious24: Help! I can’t figure out what’s wrong with my pearlscale goldfish?
Ok, first off, I’m totally new to this & the pet stores are mostly useless when it comes to responsibly selling fish. I can’t find anything online about my fish’s condition. Let me start with bringing you up to speed on the tank and then my fish’s condition…

The Tank
We’ve had it almost 3 weeks now. No one told me about cycling or what I would need to get through it and we lost our african frog “Buddy” from the ammonia levels in the 1st cycle. Petco tells me after he dies that frogs can’t handle the high ammonia due to not having scales – but they still sold him to me. Grr… We lost our placostamous “Hot Lips” next, he somehow got pinned under an abalone shell in the corner of the tank. Upon returning to get a replacement “Hot Lips the 2nd” they proceeded to sell us 3 more small fish – a neon, a zebra danio & a sm yellow fish which name I don’t recall… No advice to quarantine them 1st… they were added & the tank came down with ick.

I treated ick with Aquari-sol. The neon died during treatment & yellow fish near end of treatment. All white spots were gone on remaining fish, so I ceased treatment within 24hrs as the tank was in desperate need of filtering so I could clean/stir up the gravel.

I noticed one spot come back on the fin of 2 fish, so took the carbon filter back out & began treating again. I woke up the next morning to find a very sick pearlscale fish “Leo”

My Pearlscale’s Condition
About 60% of Leo’s scales have fallen off & he has a white layer of skin-like stuff coating his missing scales. It’s been 48 hrs and it appears the white stuff may just be a protective mechanism, as the scales appear to be healing… but he is having trouble swimming. One of the fins on his underside was not easy to control the 1st 24 hrs, but he is using it normally now. Yesterday whenever he stopped swimming he would float tail side up towards the top of the water. Now he is swimming very little but is most often face down kind of hanging there in the upper 24% of the water.

Everything online about scales falling off is from rough handling or objects in the tank. This dude had ALL scales in tact when I went to bed a couple of nights ago and 60% missing in the morning… the missing scales are disease related, they have not been knocked off.

I read about marine ick & thought this could be a pearlscale reaction to a secondary infection as I may have failed to kill it properly, since I am now reading that you have to keep treating for days after the white spots go away. I’ve moved him into a separate 1 gallon tank and am continuing ick treatment in both tanks.

My mickey mouse platy “Jack” & zebra danio “Zippy” seem to be doing pretty good, but this evening I noticed that Zippy’s belly looks bloated and I can barely get either Jack or Zippy to eat. Leo hasn’t eaten for 3 days now… the only fish seeming to be doing perfectly well is Hot Lips. He chows his algae tabs like there’s no tomorrow and is behaving normally.

Any help is appreciated… ESPECIALLY from anyone experienced with pearlscale’s… as Leo is the only one who had the issue with his scales falling off. No loss of scales on the other standard scaled fish.
Thank you for the 2nd (long) answer. It was very helpful & will likely be my choice for best answer. I agree to go tropical and Hot Lips has a 2nd home in waiting in the neighbor’s pond. Here’s what I found on bloating for the danio:

Q: My fish used to eat readily, but now he won’t eat at all. His stomach is all bloated up.

A: Sounds like the fish has internal Hexamita (Malawi Bloat).

Can anyone add info about this?

Best answer:

Answer by Kim
Try a website called just answer here is a link.

http://www.justanswer.com/tags/pet/goldfish

What do you think? Answer below!