Gills in terrible state

Hi

I took the gravel out yesterday as well as the 3 fish that were in there for him to eat as they are too big now. I sent a message about the back leg seeming to be broken and thus my reasons for trying to reduce stress.
Upon close inspection of my Axie I now see that the gills are in a terrible state. No fungus which is good. I have not seen him real close up for ages as he tends to hide a lot.
I have replaced the gravel with big sheets of slate and made sure I have some 'caves' for him to hide. I will test the water later today as I did a complete change on Saturday, but it seems that his gills have literally become buds, short stubby things. I understand this could have been water quality but I am also suspecting it could be his feeding habits. He generally will eat only 3/4 small slivers of liver twice a week. He is a skinny chap. Can undereating cause the gills to be in such a bad state? What can I do to get them to grow back. He is just over 12 years old - is this a sign of age - surely not? I read that Flagyl can increase appetite. How do I administer?
Please help!

Try to resisit the urge to carry out complete water changes, it may be doing more harm then good. Better to carry out smaller ones i.e. 20% every 2 or 3 days to establish good bacteria levels.
Poor gills are usually a sign of poor water, try to get it tested if you can.
You will need to be vigilant with cleaning under the slate in the bottom of your tank as waste and decaying food will collect underneath and affect the water.

Terrible Gills

Hi thank you - what I did not tell you all was that my two year old emptied an entire packet of fish flakes into the water and even the pump could not keep up. Off to the fishshop to see what I can put in with the carbon to reduce the levels in the tank.

I'm wary of adding anything to my water.
Carbon is used for removing liquid waste and medications from the water.
I would just keep the 20% daily water changes going, it will soon improve the water chemistry. You could try rinsing out your filter media in a bucket of tank water then put it all back together and keep the filter running, it will clear eventually.

Water Test - results

Hi

Did not 'add' anything so to speak just bought ammonia absorbing granules for teh filter and changed teh carbon.
Okay here are the test results - pse advise :

NO3 = 25
NO2 = 1
GH = 6
KH = 3 - 6
PH = 7.6

From what I am understanding - the PH is not good at all. What can I do to lower this please? And can it be the PH that is affecting the cell regenration of his gills? Now he does not want to eat. Have tried earthworms, frozen bloodworm, even refusing his ox heart.

Your pH is perfect. Really. That's an ideal value.

You've got some NO2 and NO3 which assuming your tap water is not high in NO3 means that you've got the 'cycle' going (that is where the NH3/NH4 gets converted to NO2 which gets converted to NO3 by bacteria in the filter/tank).

Just keep up with regular, partial (20% as Becky says) water changes until the NO2 reading is 0. (That is when you have enough bacteria to convert all the NH3/NH4 to NO2 and then enough to convert all the NO2 to NO3.) You may just have a temporary spike in NO2 due to the tremendous amount of waste that your bacteria has had to process - the NO2-eating bacteria usually take longer to respond than the NH3/NH4-eating bacteria.

Your other values are fine also.

Don't use the ammonia absorbing granules (things like this will invariably muck up your cycling tank = ie effectively causing more problems than actually fixing the problem - which can be sorted out by the frequent partial waterchanges mentioned by both Becky and Tyl3r).

My pH is that all the time.