I've read about HITH treatment, and basically all I see about treatment is to keep water quality good, and feed a varied diet.
Is there anything else i need to be doing?
My luck with oscars has been pretty poor, and was probably caused mostly by the 60 gal that they were in up until a little over a month ago.
My red has HITH. it started with a small hole on the gill plate, and has been spreading despite the improved conditions. Now the 7" red is in a 120G tank, with a 4" Lutino, a 5" green terror, and a 6" Syno catfish.
What EXACTLY do i need to do to avoid losing another fish?

I am embarassed to post the pic, but here it is. I don't believe myself to be a negligent owner....

thats gods way of telling you, you shouldnt diss the aggies.

no jokes aside, all i know is keep your water perfect. melafix could help.

I suppose you allready read this article.
It has some names of meds in it.
www.oscarfishlover.com/hith-disease

Good luck!

do you have any carbon in your filters??? i hear tell that can cause it so if you have it you may want to remove it

yeah, there was a bag of activated carbon in the canister that came with it... i took it out about 3 weeks ago. now the only things in the filter are the foam filter pads, bio balls and other bio material- some "matrix" material i bought at petsmart.... looks like little porous white balls
the filter is a rena xp3 good for like 160 gallons. and i clean it about once a month (it gets filthy)
looking to get a second canister around christmas

hey does that filter make much noise??? i was looking at canister filters at petsmart yesterday when i bought my new fish and the only one they had rated large enough for my 212 was a rena rated to 265gallons.... i was wondering about noise levels it would make, are you happy with it?

yeah, i have no complaints. everything for the 120 is in the cabinet under the tank, so you can't hear much. the air pump is much louder than the canister filter

cool... also... its a px4 265 gallon filter, that cost the 10 bucks more than a fluval 405 at 100 gallons...

i want the most bang for my buck. i was thinking about getting two 405's since i have dual over flows... but even then thats only rated for 200 gallons, and my tanks 212, and oscars are messy as hell. so i was thinkin it might be better to spend the extra 20 bucks and get 510 gallons worth of filtration, which would be much better for my tank with oscars i would think.

i think you should look at a fluval fx5 they cost around 300 but they are rated for up to 400 gallon aquariums.

which is close to what you would ultamitly want about 2 x your tank volume.

how would the fx5 compare vs 2 of the xp4's? thing is my tank has dual over flows, and dual returns... i wouldnt wanna link em together and run a splitter in there, and id rather have 2 independent systems for redundancy.

Thor84 wrote:
so sorry to know your fishes in trouble. since carbon had been identified,
please check your submersibel pump. any power leak could cause HITH too.
there should be grounding just in case there was power leakage.

All you can do is keep your water pristine by doing lots and lots of water changes. Be warned it takes a long time for HITH to heal