# Help! My 2 shubunkin goldfish have really bad white spot!



## ebrock91 (Nov 1, 2013)

I bought two shubunkin goldfish last week from a local petstore but noticed a few days ago that they have white spot. One has it worse than the other as they are all over his tail and fins, with his top fin being completely clamped down when i first noticed. My other fish doesn't have as many but is still quite listless.

I bought King British white spot treatment the morning after i noticed and did a partial water change before and removed the carbon filters before putting the treatment in but im worried that it's already too bad to fix as they're seems to be an awful lot of spots on them both. 

The second treatment is tomorrow but today i noticed streaks of red down both their tails and i don't know if its from the spots bursting out or if they've been rubbing on rocks. 

The only things giving me some hope is that they're both still eating happily at normal feeding times and today the clamped top fin was actually normal (well as much as it can be covered in spots/blood) 

Is it too late to save my fish? This is the first time i've ever had white spot in a tank, i used to keep tropical fish before but never had any problems with them. I know with tropicals raising the temperature helps get them off the fish for treatment to kill them but how high can i really raise the temp for shubunkins?

(Apologies for the long post :-/)


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## RubyRoo12 (Jun 20, 2012)

It should be fixable, dont panic, but you need to act quickly. Ive saved goldies who were really bad. I personally dont use white spot treatments, i use aquarium salt but either should work if done correctly. The upping the heat is just to push the white spot through the life cycle faster as they can only be killed off when they arent attached to the fish, even at room temperature it will work it will just take longer, if you do add a heater to up the temps for a while ensure there is lots of surface movement in the tank as warmer water wont hold as much oxygen. Some white spot is apparently salt resistant however ive not come across this yet. Dose the tank as it says on the carton working out how much water is in your tank first. Make sure you do partial water changes very regularly with a gravel vac to help pull any parasites that have dropped into the gravel. Only dose as much salt back into the tank to treat the new water added and not re-dose for the whole tanks volume again as the salt doesnt evaporate out. Just to note when ive treated fish in the past it does tend to look worse before it starts getting better.

What size tank are your fish in? Goldfish need really big tanks to live healthy lives, and they can suffer with more health issues and diseases if they are kept in unsuitable tanks. I hope you manage to fix your little guys


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## ebrock91 (Nov 1, 2013)

I noticed the spots on tuesday night and started treatment on wednesday so they get their second dose today. The only problem i have when using my gravel vac is that i ha ve sand in my aquarium and it all gets stuck in or sucked up the gravel vac and i am slowly running out of substrate in the bottom of my tank.

They are in a 60L tank and i only plan on having the two of them.


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## RubyRoo12 (Jun 20, 2012)

Ah i see, well just do the best you can then with the vac. Ive always kept them on gravel as goldies are so messy they need a good vac every week to remove as much mess as possible.

60L is far too small for your fish though, even a pair of fancy goldfish which dont grow as large will need about double what you have these 2 in. They should grow to around 10 inches or a little more, and dont take overly long to start having their growth stunted in a smaller tank. This can lead to health problems, and will shorten their lives considerably. A 5ft tank should be the minimum size for any common shaped goldfish which includes comets and shubunkin types. They are large messy fast swimming energetic fish and need space to swim and a large volume of water to help keep their water as clean as possible between weekly partial water changes. They also need a lot of filtration and have high oxygen needs so plenty of surface movement too.


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## ebrock91 (Nov 1, 2013)

I put sand in with my tropicals because they were less messy lol but so far I've just been trying to kind of stir up the bottom to get as much poo etc out without sucking up a lot of sand. The pet shop told me the most I could have in that tank was four but from everything I've been reading on shubinkins I definitely don't agree with them so I will be looking into getting a bigger tank as soon as I can afford one. And it will definitely have gravel in it lol! 

My fish are still going, second treatment went in today and the least affected fish is looking better though my other fish is still covered but mostly on his tail so hopefully the treatment will at least stop them covering his gills until the rest fall off him and the treatment hits them.


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## RubyRoo12 (Jun 20, 2012)

Yes its so sad that pet shops just don't care about the critters they sell, its good you know they need a much larger set-up though :2thumb: 20 years down the line you could still have 2 big beautiful healthy fish


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