Posted by Steve Gray on February 27, 2004 at 23:53:44:
In Reply to: Re: White Spots On Gold Fish posted byCharmayne on February 27, 2004 at 14:59:07:
If your filter is designed properly, you won't have to clean the bio-stage at all. You want a "mechanical" filter to catch the solids. The biological filter should be placed after the mechanical stage, so that only water without solids in it comes into contact with the biological filter, and that's where your beneficial bacteria converts ammonia into nitrite and then into nitrate. If you are cleaning your entire filter unit every few days, you could be washing away most of your beneficial bacteria that grows in the biological stage of the filter. In addition, cleaning a bio-filter with chlorinated water can also kill the beneficial bacteria that grows in the filter.
As for the white spots, are they tiny, like a pin-point spot, all over the fish, or are they larger, like 1/16-1/8" in diameter? Tiny pin-point spots on a fish is probably ichthyophthirius (Ick). This is easily treated with a 0.3% salt solution in 3 days in warm water, 78 degrees or so. If the spots are few and larger, it could possibly be a fungal growth or it may be epistylis. A 0.3% solution of salt will also kill epistylis. There are several fungal medicines on the market for fish and these fungal spots usually look puffy, like small cotton balls.
Click on the link below to go to Dr. Eric Johnson's website and learn about using salt to cure fish problems.