Advice on white spot please

For a few days now I have been browsing the forums to try and understand what white spot is and mainly what makes it happen
I know you guys will fill me in with easy to understand terms on why it happens and what makes it happen
Thanks guys

Hey Kate.
White spot is a form of protozoan parasite that lay the egg blister into the fishes flesh.
They can do that once the fish is suffering stress.
You just have to get that stress down and you will be right.
Are your fish sick?

Thank you Dazza
It still isn’t clear to me with this stress of fish
What would cause stress in a fish
There is a fish i bought that has white spot Dazza
It is a blue surgeon

The stress and the reasons for it in marine fish is extensive and complex

Stress affects a marine fish in similar ways to us humans, infact they have a few similar functions to us.

* The results of stress in marine fish are, when a marine fish suffers stress their immune system suffers as do ours and fish also have an external immune system as we do, theirs is in the mucus coating, ours is skin!

When the fishes mucus coating suffers breaks form in it allowing parasites to access the flesh at these points between scales and either lay it’s off spring like white spot or devour flesh or blood!

This with out help to the fish increases the stress and more gaps in the mucus coating appear and so on until death!

This death will be from a lack of blood or normally from suffocation as one of many types of parasites like oodinium, velvet colonises their body as well as the gills, shown as in the beginning when they try to scratch against rocks or anything they can use.

Now they may swim in circles or similar as if drunk due to the lack of oxygen getting to the brain losing control of the nervous system as they die.

Ammonia is the quickest killer via PH disruption and gill burning onto nitrite the most common stress killer of all, followed by the slow killer, nitrate!

* Other causes of stress, the most common are over feeding lowering water quality and sleep stress, you see fish do not sleep, they wait for dawn and could be very stressed during that time for what ever reasons and during the lights out time in the aquarium algae, including the symbiotic algae within the corals cells that were converting substances to oxygen and glucose is now making co2!

Co2 disrupts PH and KH levels adversely and lowers available oxygen affecting water quality in general stressing everything in the tank and when corals stress they excrete their stomach contents and this may enter the fish’s gills causing more stress.

PH and KH do not have to be at a precise level, just constant and reasonable.


* Fish for sale come from different areas and the fish have become accustomed to these areas like local water hardness, acidity and temperature.

* In adult fish if the conditions they are genetically linked to are not mimicked well, than they will be constantly stressed.

* Some fish of temperate waters have the ability to live in these conditions with a higher body temperature and if housed in higher temperatures they are constantly stressed.

The same with tropical species, if the water is to cool they cannot accomplish the needed bodily functions and will be constantly stressed.

* Most aquariums these days are run biologically by the use of the surface of live rock (dead coral) as a supposed bacterium takes control of the nitrite cycle in the aquarium.

As the load on the aquarium fluctuates this surface area can not adjust the colony quickly to the varying ammonia load on the systems nitrite cycle.

In time the porus surface of the live rock where the supposedly controlling bacteria exists is filled with materials from feeding the aquarium or creatures shedding shells and over even more time coralline covers some of the needed surface area reducing these supposed bacteria colonies and now it is not copping with load alterations.

As a tank ages the life should increase in the rock, substrate etc, and so should the biological surface area to cope with the additional waste adding to the ammonia that has the most disruptive affects on PH and KH.

* If a skimmer is used on an aquarium they can take waist out before it can go through the nitrite cycle making your aquarium totally dependent on that skimmer running with out fail because if it fails your waste becomes a nitrite content that the bacteria is not of a large enough community to handle and thus stresses the fish.

* Salinity variations in the aquarium cause several things, the organ with in fish that takes the salt out of the water and food they consume may be over worked if they are housed in higher salinity to what they are use to and they may become dehydrated as well.

The salt levels being to low may allow the wrong forms of bacteria to infest the aquariums water and adversely affect all life in the aquarium.

* Mistakes are made by keeping waring fish together and this will result in stress, so temperament matching is essential especially in small aquariums.

These are the main reasons for stress.

All this will take some remembering
Thanks for all that