Most dying fish can be easily revived with changes to the water. Maintaining water quality is essential to keeping your fish happy and healthy—and alive. You can buy a fish tank water testing kit at most pet stores. These tests can help you identify any problems with the water, such as high ammonia.
Next time your fish are sick, the remedy might not be farther away than your kitchen table. Ordinary table salt (Sodium Chloride or NaCl) is a useful remedy for the prevention and treatment of several freshwater fish diseases.
A few signs of a sick and dying fish are if they have trouble breathing, erratic movements, pale body color, or loss of appetite. These symptoms can be a result of incorrect water parameters, water temperature, stress, or injuries.
The most efficient way to rid your aquarium of pollution from a dead fish is by exchanging some of its water. You won't need to clean the entire tank, but removing any contaminants that could have leached into the water is critical.
Many fish species prefer a calm water environment. If the tank water current is too strong, the fish might struggle to swim or eat comfortably, preferring instead to gravitate to the bottom of the tank to escape the water flow. That leads to stress, and the fish might even starve.
Your fish keep dying even with water that tests perfectly due to common reasons such as the wrong aquarium size, incompatible mates, temperature fluctuations, etc. The fish can also be reaching their old age. Furthermore, you might have an ill fish that didn't receive proper care.
Loss of appetite. Weakness or listlessness. Loss of balance or buoyancy control, floating upside down, or 'sitting' on the tank floor (most fish are normally only slightly negatively-buoyant and it takes little effort to maintain position in the water column) Erratic/spiral swimming or shimmying.
The most common causes of fish deaths are poor water quality, “new tank syndrome,” and stress. Those causes are likely to blame if you have problems in your aquarium.
Do Fish Feel Pain When They Suffocate? Fish certainly feel pain when they suffocate, which can be an incredibly drawn-out process. It can take some fish species over an hour to die from asphyxiation.
Isolate sick fish. Add antibiotics to the water and use antibiotic-medicated food. Maintain good water quality. Quarantine any fish with signs of the disease.
When Disease occurs: The most appropriate time to consider euthanasia, is when a disease occurs. In cases when diseases are highly contagious, or very hard to treat or even untreatable, then the old adage of one bad apple in the barrel, can be synonymous with one sick fish in the tank.
Add 1 tablespoon (Tbsp) of salt per 3 gallons of water. You can pour the salt directly into the aquarium or hospital tank, but some people like to dissolve the salt in a small cup of water first. This level of salt is like using Neosporin topical ointment for a small cut (in other words, it's not very strong).
In some cases, mild stress is something your aquarium fish can recover from but, in many cases, it is an early sign of something that can become a major problem. To maintain the health of your aquarium fish, you need to learn how to identify the signs of distress.
In reality, seeing one fish eat another actually means very little. When a fish dies, other fish in the tank will quickly take advantage of the situation. Even a fish that is still alive, but is very weak or sick, will be picked on by his tank mates.
If your fish is swimming frantically without going anywhere, crashing at the bottom of his tank, rubbing himself on gravel or rocks, or locking his fins at his side, he may be experiencing significant stress. Talk to your veterinarian about treatment and look into what may be causing the stress and alleviating it.
There are many reasons why fish in your tank keep dying. A few reasons include stress, incorrect tank setup, overfeeding, diseases, and much more. To a beginner, it could look like your fish died for no reason whatsoever.
Numerous studies in recent years have demonstrated that fish feel and react to pain. For example, when rainbow trout had painful acetic acid or bee venom injected into their sensitive lips, they stopped eating, rocked back and forth on the tank floor, and rubbed their lips against the tank walls.
Check the fish's eyes.
Look at the eye as a whole. If they're sunken, your fish is dead or near death. Look for cloudy pupils, which is also a sign of death in most aquarium fish. If your fish is a pufferfish, walleye, rabbit fish, or scorpionfish, occasional eye cloudiness might actually be normal.
They could also be bottom sitting due to water conditions, parasites or bacteria, stress, or gastrointestinal problems. If they are bottom sitting due to water conditions, then this needs to be corrected with checking the water daily and doing large water changes until the water is within appropriate parameters.
A few of the steps you can take to save a dying fish after a water change is to ensure you stop feeding the fish immediately and also increase the oxygen content in the water. Aquarium salt has also been known to be a lifesaver in such situations.
This can be easily done using an air pump, performing large water changes, manually stirring the water, or placing a fan near the aquarium. Oxygen, in particular, dissolved oxygen (DO), is one of the most important indicators of water quality, as it is essential for the survival of fish and other aquatic organisms.
Take time to grieve.
There is nothing strange or wrong with mourning the passing of a living being that was important to you, indeed it is a natural reaction. Don't feel the need to hurry up and get over the death of your fish.
There is no U.S. law that makes the practice illegal, but it is still unwise, as fish (dead or alive) can transmit diseases into the ecosystem. Goldfish are not considered a flushable item, and septic systems are only meant to handle waste and toilet paper.