FEMALE SEAHORSE NOT EATING AND MOVING SLOW

Dear Brian:

Rats, I’m sorry to hear about the difficulties your female seahorse is having. Something is seriously wrong with her but I have no real idea what that could be. It sounds like she is suffering from generalized weakness, which could be the result of malnutrition and she has stopped eating for any significant period of time.

I would recommend testing all of your water quality parameters, including the dissolved oxygen levels, to determine if anything is amiss with your water chemistry, and then performing a major water change and general cleaning of the aquarium. Please report back to us regarding your current aquarium parameters (ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, pH, water temperature, and dissolved oxygen levels and carbonate hardness or alkalinity, if you know them) so we can help you adjust them and take corrective measures if any of them are not where they should be, sir.

It’s difficult to speculate about what’s wrong with your female and why did she has stopped eating when our only symptoms are a lack of appetite and weakness, which may be due to the former, so all I can suggest is that you work on correcting her loss of appetite. Some of the factors that have been reported to contribute to a loss of appetite are listed below:

(1) deteriorating water quality.

(2) low oxygen and/or high CO2 levels.

(3) a deficiency of trace elements and minerals.

(4) various disease processes — in particular, internal parasites.

Regardless of how your water chemistry appears right now, a good place to start addressing this problem would be to perform a 25%-35% water change immediately to safeguard the water quality and replenish depleted trace elements and minerals. (At first glance your aquarium parameters may look great, but there are some water quality issues that are difficult to detect with standard tests, such as a decrease in dissolved 02, transitory ammonia/nitrite spikes following a heavy feeding, pH drift, a deficiency and trace elements/minerals, or the gradual accumulation of detritus. A water change and cleanup is a simple preventative measure that can help defuse those kinds of hidden factors before they become a problem and stress out your seahorses. These simple measures may restore your water quality as well as your seahorses’ appetite.)

Be sure to check your dissolved oxygen (O2) level in addition to the usual pH, ammonia, nitrite and nitrite readings.. A significant drop in O2 levels (6 – 7 ppm is optimal) or rise in CO2 levels is very stressful yet easily corrected by increasing surface agitation and circulation to promote better oxygenation and gas exchange. Add a shallow airstone just beneath the surface if necessary and increase the circulation throughout your tank it possible.

Whether the beneficial effects are due to improving water quality or replenishing depleted trace elements or something else altogether, performing a major water change as described above often sets things right when seahorses are off their feed for no apparent reason.

In the meantime, while you are working on your water quality, by all means get some live foods to keep your female eating and see if you can fatten her up a bit. You’ve got to keep her strength up and give her a chance to recover before you can worry about weaning her back onto frozen foods again. Hawaiian red feeder shrimp or volcano shrimp (Halocaridina rubra) are ideal for this — seahorses find them utterly irresistible! But anything that’s readily available — enriched adult brine shrimp, live ghost shrimp that are small enough to be swallowed, newborn guppies or mollies, Gammarus amphipods, copepods, you name it — is worth a try. Just get some good meals into them ASAP to build up her strength and help her regain her conditioning.

Best of luck getting your female eating and back to her usual self again, Brian.

Respectfully,
Pete Giwojna