I was looking at my oscars after doing my water changes and noticed my albino has a crater on his head. I had noticed it before but it was so small so I thought he just banged himself but it is getting bigger. The other 2 seem fine but I need to know what to do. Do I put him in a seperate tank? Is it contageous? What medications do I use (I live in the USA) Should I treat all 3? If it gets worse I am just euthanisng him I cant let him get like those pictures ive seen I love him too much for that. My temp is 79.8 F nitrite amonia both 0 and nitrate is only 11 I just did a water change. Please Help, Jon

How old/big is your oscar. If they are still quite small (for oscars) what you may be seeing is the development of the sensory pits. You can see the sensory pics in this thread. They are the little pin pricks
around the eyes

www.oscarfishlover.com/component/option,...ew/catid,18/id,3743/

The best thing to try to cure HITH is to keep the water really good by doing lots of water changes but if your nitrates is only 11 then your water is good anyway

A picture would be a great help

delboybully wrote:


Ditto, when mine was just starting to get sensory pits i freaked lol, i even bought hith meds and treated like it said just to read up that it wasnt hith. Let us know how it goes for you.

Jimmy

I have a photo but im not home I will upload later. I am 95% sure its HITH he is white and it is a crater almost as wide as a penny and probably as deep and it is whiter then his scale copler. I bought some Melafix and am going to add it with some salt but do I treat the whole tank or put him in a seperate one then treat it?

Not the best pics but its the whiter area on his head.

Bit hard to see but if you mean what I think I'm seeing, that sure would be no sensory pit. Hard to tell though if it's HITH or an infected wound maybe or whatever, if that is possible from a pic at all.
If you want to treat in a separate tank you'd need less of the treatment, but it should be a cycled one, else problems with water quality might arise and make it even worse for the albino Oscar. Should go unsaid but when adding the dissolved salt, make sure you don't pour it in anywhere near the fish.
Should it really be HITH (which I consider rather as a symptom than a disease), that might have various reasons still ... if anything parasitic involved, you might still have to treat with other meds, preferably in a cycled hospital tank then.

Its hard to get a really good photo the thing is he is acting normal so should I just do daily water changes or just be safe and quarantine/treat?

Most HITH medication really only cure an infection cause by the HITH, so they wouldn't be of any help unless you started seeing fungus etc. It will help a little, but not as well as just doing big water changes. You won't need to quarantine as long as you keep up the WC. You may also want to add some bio-spira or stress zyme, depending are where you are the name may be different.

I started seeing it develop on other parts of his body I treated the tank with Melafix as a precaution removed all carbon from filters and the tank is sitting at about 82 degrees. I am doing 25-50% daily water changes depending on readings and am hoping for the best but there was nothing wrong with my water prior I tested weekly and did 50% water changes 2x a week.

Water changes will not do any harm and will help if it is HITH. Its hard to tell from the pic, it might be a skin infection. Do the craters have a depth to them. Are they in smooth circles. Check out some previous threads on HITH to compare.

If it is a skin infection, meds will help. Jungle parasite clean, metradonazile, and other meds will help. Really, the best cure for HITH is clean water. There are a bunch of good HITH related threads in the emergency, please help forum.

Well it's day 4 I've been doing daily 25-50% water changes adding salt, stress coast, stress zyme, and melafix and I actually see it looking like its healing kind of the say a human scabs. I don't think I am using carbon anymore because they eat Hikari Gold, Bio-Gold, meal worms, crickets, night crawlers, beef heart, krill, river shrimp, and feeders so its not their diet and I don water changed 2x weekly so It might be the carbon but only 1 out of 3 got it so who really knows.