Tigrinus catfish w/ infection

[.C.J.]

I've never seen it on our tigs.

I generally don't believe tigs to be a sensitive, touchy or fragile fish from our experience with 12 tigs from baby up to 5-7 years old, but may be wrong about older tigs.

It looks like a bacterial infection. The most likely reason is the tig is stressed. High nitrates is the only red flag from what's given. This can be the source of stress, especially because nitrates is not an absolute test, as many other anions interfere with the test, like the ubiquitous chloride. The 40-80 ppm nitrate could be okay if this was an absolute number but in reality the number can easily be 2x, 3x, 5x or even 10x higher. The acute toxicity of nitrate begins around 1000 ppm, if memory serves. If your 40-80 ppm is in reality 400-800 ppm, that can be lethal in not too long a run.

If not nitrates, you will have to troubleshoot other sources of stress, like wrong water hardness and salinity, pH, unstable pH, etc. I can paste a complete questionnaire to help in asking yourself questions.

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I don't like the slime comment either. If the slime appearance coincided with the tig losing appetite and this inflammation appearing, it's more than a valid reason to figure out what this slime is and where and why it appeared.

Set up automated WC, what they call drip, if WCs are laborious.

Im suspecting the cause might be because of the chums in the water that is caused by the batik when im feeding it. It recently developed this habit of chewing its food too much before swallowing it which causes a lot of floating fish chunks on the water as compared to before when it swallowed its food instantly. Probably thats what caused the slime build up because theres too much organics in the water. Plus, i didnt clean the sponges this week when i did my weekly water change routine.

i also dont believe that tigs are too fragile as this tig has survived twice, that the tank was drained 90% because of a plumbing problem and was filled back up the same day.

I already started to do 40% water changes today in which i’ll do it every other day to help with the nitrate building up and also not feeding the tank as often as before. pH is same as usual, around 7.2. Hopefully in the following days its condition improves cause ive raised this guy from 6”.