Hello I am new to this site and this is my first post!

I have a 100 gallon tank and currently have one tiger oscar and one red oscar. The tiger oscar seems to have rapid breathing, pertruding gills, and a 'cough', along with opening and closing of the mouth. For the past few days the tiger has been sulking around the tank, when hes not hanging near or sitting on the gravel, he moves around the tank real slow and hangs in spots for a while. Everything seems fine when its time to eat but soon after he goes back to sulking and not his usual -cant stop moving arond- self.

Originally when i bought my oscars about a month ago, i started with four. About a week or so after, this same tiger began showing rapid breathing and being very lethargic. My first instict was stress from being bullied. So i divided the tank with three on one side and the sick tiger on the other. The symptoms continued and seemed to worsen so my next guess was parasites. I bought and treated the tank with Tank Buddies Parasite Clear. A week or so later the tiger seemed much better, but continued with the rapid breathing.

As i said before i started with four oscars. A couple days after i put in the divider the albino sat on the gravel, didnt move, didnt eat and three days later was dead. About a week later, the other tiger i had did the same exact thing.

Since this time i have been doing once daily 25% water changes and once a week 75% water changes. I check my water parameters daily. Today was: ph 7.6, ammonia 0ppm, nitrite 0ppm, nitrate 5ppm.

Everything seems to have been going fine for a couple weeks, until the other day when the tiger started sulking. As i said he still has the rapid breathing, pertruding gills, a 'hic-up' or 'cough', and the fast opening and closing of the mouth.

If anyone has any advice, input is greatly appreciated.
Sorry for the long post....
Thanks!!

hi and welcome to the site i am not sure what to say but there will soon be somebody on here that will tell you for sure can u post pics as our friends on here might be able to help u more with pics aswell. mine did the same and they told me to keep up the water changes daily and mine lived for 2 weeks but the died but he picked up abit from the star of it so keep it up and hope yours gets saved early unlike mine good luck. will

is your tank oxygenated enough? like water agitation from a filter or air stone? is the only thing i can think of i am sure someone has better experience and knowledge of this but the gasping sounds like there is not enough oxygen in the water...

Hey guys! thanks for the quick replies.
Yes i forgot to mention i have an air stone in the tank, connected to a Top Fin air pump xp30. For my fitration system i have 2 rena filstar xp2 canister filters with power nozzels on the outlet pipes.

Rapid breathing is not good. I would say that the problems you had earlier are still the cause. If i remember right your tank wasnt cycled and you may be seeing the consequences. Keep the water good and see how things go

there's a good chance your fish came with a problem or has got some damage from the cycle. ammonia/nitrites damages the eye and gills first so if you had spikes while cycling some damage may be present. pet shops are well know for selling poor condition fish so it could be this too. it will be hard to pinpoint what. if the other fish show no sign of ill health and the one fish still dose not recover i would guess gill damage. but its just a guess. at best if you maintain good conditions it could recover. keep check for any sign of infection and have a very close look for pests like parasites.

Hey guys Thanks!
My tiger has still been sulking and been lethargic the past few days. Feeding time is the only time he seems to be fine. Ive noticed some black spots around his gills when he goes pale at times. Im not sure if this is part of his color or not.
My red seems to be doing well and shows no similar signs.
The tiger seemed to be fine, besides the rapid breathing, for about a two weeks or so before a few days ago.
Besides water changes is there anything i can do to help the tiger, and will he eventually recover from gill damage if that is the case?

if it is gill damage it will depend how bad but yes there is a chance he will be fine.Only time will tell. The fact its feeding is a good sign, dose it become lively when feeding? without seeing the spots its hard to judge. any chance of a clear pic. I personally would wait. adding a treatment may make breathing harder for the fish, if you add the wrong med then again it could make things worst. the spots could be a parasite but the other fish would become infected so i am not sure.may be scars from a infection that has cleared???? at best I would add stress coat if anything or if your water treatment has a stress coat as most do, i would add enough to cope with stress as the bottle instruction direct. you say you have already added a parasite med, may be that has cleared the problem and the fish just needs time to recover and the spots you see are makes left???

Hey Marcus Thanks!
Yeah when it is feeding time the tiger becomes lively and active. But soon after goes back to hanging around and not as active. When i approach the tank if he hasnt eaten yet he will come to the glass and act fine for a while. The rapid breathing is still occuring but today and yesterday after my 75% water change he looked a bit better. I didnt do a water change saturday night because i wanted to give the tiger a stress free night and i knew i was gonna do a large water change the next day.

As far as the black spots, they look like part of his color when he is flush. But when he goes pale at times the small black dots are more visible near his gills, similar to the black dot on the tiger oscar's tail fin. The only thing that has me wondering is i remember seeing these spots on my other tiger that died a couple weeks back. So like i said not sure if its part of his color or not.
On a fish disease diagnosis website, www.fishyportal.com/diag/ , black spots are common with Ichthyosporidium hoferi and Fish Tuberculosis (Mycobacterium piscium).

So not sure if im being paranoid or not, but i lost two oscars already and dont want to lose my survivors. Gill damage sounds very probable, as when i treated the tank a while back my guess was parasites, maybe somthing like gill flukes. So as you said maybe he just needs time to recover....

Arite so i dont get it....
I didnt do a water change wed or thurs night, thurs and more so yesterday the tiger was looking better. The rapid breathing was near a minimum, the mouth opening and closing was near minumum, all his fins were out, he was swimming around alot, and his color looked good. So last night i did a 50% water change to catch up and today hes right back to where he was before?!??!?

My convict got the same thing or something similar. We did a lot of research and we think it had fish tuberculosis. It would lay at the bottom of the tank and would act like it couldn't breathe. We have a 15 gallon tank we put the fish in by itself. We put treatment in it for bacteria and did the recommended water changes. We also found that it helps if you put vitamins in the tank. We put kids vitamin B-complex its sublingual liquid with dropper on the top, in the tank and added a stronger air stone in the small tank to produce a lot of oxygen. We put like 4 drops every other day in the tank. The fish is now better!! I was told that its really hard for a fish to get better once it gets tuberculosis. We kept it in the tank by itself for probably 2 months until it looked healthy. I put it back in the big tank with my other fish and they started bullying it. I removed him from the big tank and placed it back in the tank by itself. The fish is now healthy and happy! This was about 5 months ago when it first got sick so not sure how long it will take for your fish to get healthy.

I forgot to tell you I also added some aquarium salt for freshwater fish to the med tank. It adds essential electrolytes, improves gill function, and promotes disease recovery. Hopefully this was helpful, and your fish gets better!