My Oscar has been battling HITH. All water prams are perfect. Really think the problem has resulted from my keeping tank cleaner than necessary. Anyway, HITH seems to be improving but now his mouth looks to be swollen. O hasn't eaten very well in about 6-8 weeks. Any suggestions would be appreciated. O is about 5 years old. Tank is 55 gal.

That is a new one on me, a clean tank causing hole in the head disease. Anyway, a photograph would be very helpful. Difficult to see what could cause this. Trauma is always
a possibility as Oscars can be rather clumsy sometimes. There is always the chance that there are some kind of infection by these are very difficult to diagnose. For the time being, just make sure that the water is in very good condition. Your fish is an adult now and doesn't need to eat too much. I would actually only feed every other day and only once a day when you do. You could even leave it longer if you wanted to, maybey every three days. You may well find that the Oscar will actually eat food when this procedure is carried out.

Thank you for reply. I cleaned the tank weekly to bi weekly, vacumning half the water. The pet store guy says I am stressing him out and should only clean every 2-3 weeks. I have an efeim and a fluval 304 filters running. I am now cleaning only once a week and only 1/3 of water. Any other suggestions would be great. I hate to lose this old and funny friend.

Hi Pammy, hope your problem is solved very fast - you are at the right place with guys that are really supportive and helpful. Hope that once a week is not too much, I'm doing 50% changes every week. I've also got a strong pump (don't know the make of it) and a strong Cacade with filters. Too scared for that H-disease - Penn and Jake, is once a week too much????

pammy wrote:


This kind of advice is both erroneous and quite frankly, irresponsible. If you had a very large tank with your Oscar in it then yes, you could probably leave the tank for a couple of weeks, maybe more depending on the setup. However, the majority of people who keep Oscars actually keep them in less than 100 gallons. Weekly water changes are very important. If you don't do water changes, your water quality will go downhill very quickly. You will have lots of waste building up inside the tank because whilst the filters do remove a lot of waste, there is always some left, this must be removed by vacuuming. Three weeks of Oscar poop, yuck. If you do you neglect to clean your tank out on a regular basis, it could result in your fish developing health problems. Yes, I fish may be come slightly stressed when doing water changes. If you just take a time and don't rush things then the Oscar will be perfectly okay. Oscars are all very resilient fish and bounce back quite easily from mishaps. You're better off having fish that may suffer a little stressed for a few minutes then having a tank full of horrible water.

What sized tank have you got? Your Fluval 304 is good for around 300 L, that is around 60 gallons (a rough guess) so if you've got another filter, you are doing quite well, depending on your tank size. There is no such thing as too much filtration for an Oscar.

Feeling much better...

Pammy, I want to share this with you - last night I cleaned by 2 big oscars' tank - and boy did they stress me out!! There is a piece of slate in the tank (which they guard with their lives) and I could not clean around that piece of slate - the one (which I think is the female) attacked me non-stop - so much so that I only cleaned with the vacuum on the other side of the tank. She bumped me with the nose - which is very, very hard and then bit me... 10 minutes later I still got very dirty looks from her, but she was more than fine.