I've already posted about this but I wanted to do a bit of an update and give the full story, now that I'm fairly certain of what I'm dealing with. Here's the origional post http://www.kokosgoldfish.invisionzone.com/...showtopic=71601. As for the tank basics, it's a fully cycled, heavily planted 20 gallon with 3 varieties of tetras, a few male guppies, 4 cories and an otto. There's no ammonia or nitrite and the nitrates are very low. The pH stays low, around 6.2, and I use a kH buffer to keep it stable. I add prime and there's a penguine filter running. I feed bloodworms, hikari tropical pellets, spirulina flakes, and shrimp pellets.

The problem is, I consistently lose neon tetras, but at a very slow rate. Over the past year, I've probably had 6 or 7 die, but it's always what seems like a slow deterioration in their condition, then they die. I thought once last year that my fish had ich because one of the neons had noticable white spots. I also thought it could be fungus, but it never seemed to spread or grow into the typical type of fungus I'd seen before.

This week I've noticed that two of my tetras are having mouth/jaw problems (see the previous topic). I know that at least one of them has had this problem for months, but I had thought it was an injury, not mouth rot. This guy has since dissapeared (I'm assuming death, it's hard to find bodies in a tank with so many plants/rocks and bottom feeders unsure.gif ) and on closer inspection, I see that my third neon, who has no mouth problem, is developing the grey/white spots on this tail. I'm assuming this is the beginnings of the same infection.

My issue is, I don't want to dose my tank with anything that will knock out the cycle or harm the other fish, notably the corries and otto. I'm assuming I need to use some sort of antifungus med for this. I guess the best thing to do would be to set up a hospital tank for the remaining neons and dose them in there, but honsetly the space in my apartment is so scarce now that I don't think I can do that - not to mention that I don't have a spare tank at the moment.

Does anyone know what I might be able to do? As I've said, this seems to be a really slow moving infection and none of my other fish seem to be contracting it, only the neons.