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When a fish gets red skin blotches invariably everyone on social media will immediately comment that the fish has ammonia poisoning. They are generally wrong.

White Skin Blotches can be caused by a lot of things. Treating them can be difficult as it is difficult to identify what the disease is.

Spinal deformities in aquarium fish have many different things which could have caused this. It mostly occurs in captive bred fish.

A common fish symptom is “spinning”, “twirling” or “whirling”. Many hobbyists mistake this with swim bladder disease. But in swim bladder, the fish assume an abnormal posture. In “twirling”, there is no posture at all. This symptom is most often caused by a gram-positive bacterium.

Fish suffering from the shimmies rapidly quiver as they swim, rocking from side to side. Shimmying is a symptom rather than a single disease, and an indication that a fish no longer has proper control of its nerves and muscles.

Swim bladder syndrome is can be seen occasionally in the aquarium. The swim bladder is an internal gas-filled organ that allows the fish to control its buoyancy, and thus to stay at the desired water depth without having to waste energy in swimming. A fish with swim bladder disorder will sink to the bottom or float to the top of the aquarium.

If most of the fish in an aquarium have “hollow belly” this is generally due to lack of enough food. If only a few fish have a “hollow belly” the number of possible pathogens is in the hundreds.

In dropsy, the abdominal cavity becomes swollen because an organ or organs inside of it becomes swollen.

Cichlid fish from Lake Malawi in Africa (“African Cichlids”) often get very swollen in the belly. This is the infamous “Malawi Bloat”. But it should be noted that “bloat” is seen in Cichlids not from Lake Malawi. Dropsy and Bloat Dropsy and bloat are two conditions seen often in fish. Both mean a fish that […]