ich, fin rot, and floating to top of tank. what do i do?!

hello,

about four months ago i got my first fish tank.( 15 gallons ) i have three female guppies and two male, a cory, one male mini platy, two unknown fish, 4 three month old guppies, and 21 babies (born on Halloween), and one baby who is ten days older then the halloween babies..

about two weeks ago i started seeing signs of ich. it started to get really bad, i am doing treatments but i think that it might be expired.

now all of my guppies have fin rot, and it's getting really bad. i started doing water changes and today i got a new ich treatment and aquarium salt. i have raised my tempertature to about 82 degrees.


i noticed that the older baby literally picked all of the white spots off of my platy, it was the strangest thing and looked very painful. he now has no white spots, and he is one of the few who don't have fin rot, but two days ago i noticed that he was floating at the top and he cannot swim down, but he not bloated at all.

i don't know what to do!
the reason for all of this happening i think is because i was having bad luck with filters and i went through three before i actually found one that works last week.

help???

I read your other post before this one, so please excuse the gaps. Your aquarium is fairly small, and small aquariums can go bad very fast if you happen to over feed, under maintain, introduce a diseased fish or plant, or have a sudden change in any water parameter. It's also very easy to over medicate. I'm not a disease expert, but I believe ich is a parasite. Healthy fish carry all sorts of parasites, but they can fight them off unless their immune systems are subjected to some kind of shock. Most probably, you had ammonia spikes when the filters stopped working; ammonia spikes are very dangerous to aquarium fish. As mentioned in the other post, regular partial water changes will avoid that problem. After water quality is back to normal, weekly partial water changes are recommended.

What sort of filters did you try? Most work just fine if you don't over feed. Most people who are new to the hobby tend to feed their fish too much, and that creates water problems, diseases, etc. If the fish do not act very hungry, they are usually sick.

Overfeeding and poor filtration in such a small tank can go bad very quickly.

I find that if I feed a VERY small amount twice a day and supplement with some live or frozen foods, that helps the color and keeps from overfeeding. I also fast all of my adult fish at least once a week. Where I don't feed them anything at all for an entire day.

Good Luck and keep us posted.

Also, if you set up a hospital tank, as I mentioned in another post... You can use it as a quarantine tank as well, and keep the fish in it until you are sure they aren't bringing anything but themselves into your tank.