internal infection ?

[matthew]

Hi friends, who can tell me what made one of my honey gold gourami's stomach blow up like a balloon. Thank you.

[Tommy Gun]

Hey matthew! Welcome to the forum!!!!

Please let me preface my comments below by pointing out the fact that I am not a biologist, veterinarian, or otherwise trained extensively enough to give you a 100% accurate diagnosis...and coupled with the fact that we cannot see your fish first hand, this reply is based heavily on some educated guesses and nothing more.

That being said, there could be a few reasons why your gourami is having this abnormally large belly. While I am sure that you will soon hear a lot of people telling you that this is an illness called 'bloat' or 'dropsy', in reality these are just symptoms of an underlying cause. In most cases, this 'balloning' of your fishes' belly is caused by either a fungal or bacterial infection which causes internal organs to swell, which in turn makes the fish look as if was pregnant and/or somewhat like an open pine cone.

To treat for this problem, you would make a much larger impact on any internal bacterial or fungal infection by medicating the fish's food so that it ingests the medicine(s). This is due in part to the fact that, based upon my understanding, freshwater fish do not really use much of the water it resides within inside its body, so the meds may never cross paths with the fungus/bacteria. To do this, you can soak fish food in water which has some meds dissolved in it. However, if the medicated food is not eaten in a relatively short period of time, there is a great chance that the meds would simply leach out and again, be much less effective in the overall scheme of things. To help ensure that this does not happen, I have often read information on this issue which suggests feeding your fish much less than normal (possibly once a day, or every other day depending on your current feeding methods) to ensure that when you do put the food in the tank, it gets eaten as fast as possible.

Additionally, this can also be caused by simple constipation and so you may be able to treat for that by feeding your fish some peas. I suppose that if you haven't heard that until now, it sounds relatively crazy, but it does work. Also, in the future, I might suggest using some sort of garlic additive for your fish food since this can help by increasing your fish's immune system and/or help fight off internal parasites, among a few other possible benefits as well.