Because of the health issues that new livebearers regularly face, we consulted with ichthyologists and extensively tested a wide spread of fish medications to find the best ones to cure bacterial, fungal, and parasitic infections. Based on our research, we narrowed down the search to three broad-spectrum medications \u2013 Mardel Maracyn<\/a>, Aquarium Solutions Ich-X<\/a>, and Fritz ParaCleanse<\/a>. Our fish store has received thousands of fish over the years, and every fish gets treated with this trio of quarantine medications to ensure they have a clean bill of health. Read this article<\/a> on how to use these medications to proactively treat your fish at home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trio of quarantine medications<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shimmying is a symptom often seen in mollies and other livebearers where the fish rocks its body from side to side in a snake-like slithering motion. The shimmies can be caused by:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The last reason is one of the most common problems, since as mentioned previously, most farm-raised livebearers are cultured in hard water or brackish water environments. Therefore, the conventional wisdom for the past 30 to 40 years has been to add salt to treat shimmying in livebearers and African cichlids. \u201cLivebearer salt\u201d not only contains sodium chloride salt (e.g., regular table salt and aquarium salt), but also a mixture of calcium, magnesium, electrolytes, and other minerals that are essential for healthy biological functions. However, one of the main reasons why we don\u2019t always recommend salt is because it can harm plants and snails at higher concentrations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mollies are prone to shimmying if they were originally raised in brackish (partly freshwater and partly saltwater) environments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If your livebearer is shimmying, provide the optimal living conditions with higher pH levels from 7.0 to 8.0, warmer temperatures between 76\u00b0 and 80\u00b0F, and increased mineral content. If you have soft water, minerals can be easily added with supplements such crushed coral<\/a>, Wonder Shell<\/a>, and Seachem Equilibrium<\/a>. If your tap water is extremely hard, simply doing more frequent, partial water changes may be enough to bring additional minerals into the aquarium. Just remember that the fish you bought may have been sitting at the wholesaler and fish store for a long time in fresh water with no minerals. Therefore, it may not be possible to save the fish if the damage was already done and it wasn\u2019t treated quickly enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A typical example of wasting disease looks like this: you buy 20 fish and a month later, five of them look very skinny while the rest are acting fine. Eventually those five fish pass away, and then a couple of months later, you notice five more fish are getting thinner and are also starting to die one by one. This type of livebearer disease is usually caused by internal parasites, such as tapeworms or camallanus red worms. The parasites steal nutrients from the fish\u2019s body, causing weight loss and organ damage in the long term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tapeworms infest a fish\u2019s digestive system and can cause intestinal blockages. Some symptoms include stringy poop and weight loss, but the disease can be hard to accurately diagnose without examining the feces under a microscope. That\u2019s why we recommend that every fish gets a preventative treatment of ParaCleanse<\/a>, which contains an antiparasitic drug called metronidazole and a dewormer called praziquantel. Two to three weeks after the initial treatment, you should use another round of ParaCleanse to ensure that all newly hatched eggs are also eliminated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tapeworms can be difficult to identify unless you use a microscope to examine the fish’s waste.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If ParaCleanse does not stop the wasting disease, you may need to try another kind of dewormer. Fritz Expel-P<\/a> is very effective for treating roundworms, camallanus red worms<\/a>, hookworms, and even planaria in your aquarium. While most internal parasites are invisible to the naked eye, camallanus worms are easier to spot since you can visually see small, red worms sticking out of the fish\u2019s anus. Medications like Expel-P that contain the active ingredient of levamisole or flubendazole work by paralyzing the adult worms so that they can be expelled by the fish and removed using an aquarium siphon. Two to three weeks after the initial treatment, dose the tank again with the dewormer to deal with any remaining parasites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Worms are particularly easy to spread because their eggs are passed through fish waste and livebearers are excellent scavengers that tend to consume infected feces. While worms also affect other species like angelfish, they usually don\u2019t kill them because the parasites are so tiny in comparison to the large cichlids. However, when a guppy or other small livebearer gets infected, they are much smaller in size, and it only takes a few worms to wreak havoc on their health.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Prevention is key to your fish\u2019s health, so if you plan on getting new livebearers, follow these simple guidelines:<\/p>\n\n\n\n If your fish display a different set of symptoms and you don\u2019t believe they have livebearer disease, check out our articles on other fish illnesses with detailed instructions to help you:<\/p>\n\n\n\n source: https:\/\/www.aquariumcoop.com\/blogs\/aquarium\/livebearer-disease<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Livebearer disease is a catch-all term used to describe many disorders that commonly affect livebearers…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2726,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,49,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antiobiotics","category-fish","category-lifestyle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aquabiotics.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aquabiotics.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aquabiotics.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aquabiotics.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aquabiotics.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2725"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.aquabiotics.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2727,"href":"https:\/\/www.aquabiotics.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2725\/revisions\/2727"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aquabiotics.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aquabiotics.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aquabiotics.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aquabiotics.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Aquarium](\"https:\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0311\/3149\/files\/New_Trio_2000x_d6c52fee-1a64-4b26-8b74-b58761a7dd0c.jpg?v=1630694357\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nShimmies, Shimmying, or Molly Disease<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
![\"Cremecicle](\"https:\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0311\/3149\/files\/Cremecicle_Lyretail_Molly.jpg?v=1592429735\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nWasting Disease or Skinny Disease<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"tapeworm](\"https:\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0311\/3149\/files\/tapeworm_eggs.jpg?v=1592429769\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nHow to Prevent Livebearer Disease<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n