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Any ideas on what else to use for bacterial infections, if that's actually what it is?
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Is that a Redin Pickerel? That's awesome.
I lost all my fish when I lost power for almost two weeks following hurricane Sandy. Right now, all I have in my aquarium is a shoal of feeders to keep the filter biologically active until I can catch more fish.
Adding new fish to an established aqurium, even if they are feeders, always carries the risk of introducing a new disease the aquarium. One of the things I do to lower that risk was quarantine my feeders for a while before feeding them. As I said, the pet store and bait store minnows are in bad shape. They were often sick, sometimes poisoned on their own ammonia, and usually starved to lower their waste output.
I have a separate, established aquarium that I add a dozen or less feeders to at a time. Over the period of a week or two, the hopelessly sick ones will die off. The healthy ones will bounce back. I suspect the healthy fish carry fewer pathogens due to their own immune system fuction. The other advantage to quarantining feeders is they are eating flake food. A feeder that is "gut-loaded" with a healthy diet is far more nutritious than an emaciated, starved minnow.
I don't know what's happeing with your pickerel. Perhaps it's not bacterial, but has to do with spikes of ammonia in the aquarium. Things have to happen slowly in an aqurium not to throw the filtration system off balance. The ammonia oxidizing bacteria adjust thier population to meet the daily availability of waste produced by the resident fish. Perhaps when you dump in a dozen feeders, the added waste from the predator metabolizing all those fish at once and the waste produced by the feeders themselves may cause a spike in the ammonia making the fish appear to have an infection.
Well, that's just my theory. I usually only feed a little at a time at least once a day to keep everything in balance.
