Purple Tang has ich!? Advice needed!

[cabrego]

I picked up a (small) purple tang 1 week ago from BRK. I have kept her in a quarantine (non medicated) 26 gallon to observe her before putting her in the big tank. I noticed the first signs of ich the day before yesterday. I am posting this because I need some advice on what to do.

 

Things I am considering,

 

1. Leave her in the quarantine and observe for a few more days. She is eating pretty good. She just seems scared when anyone walks up to the tank.

 

2. Move her to the big tank with hopes that the larger swim space will make her more comfortable.

 

3. Move her immediately to a copper based medicated quarantine, for this I only have a 10 gallon or a 20 long.

 

Please give me some advice, thanks!

[Brian Ward]

based on where the tang is right now, hypo is your best bet. Be sure you have hiding spots in your QT - this is usually done with large PVC fittings. If the fish is feeling stressed, it will tend to allow the ich to show itself better. for hypo treatment, bring the sg down to 1.010. hold it there for 4 - 6 weeks. keep up with your topoff because if it goes up to 1.012 or higher, you'll need to start over. That sg should allow the fish to fight off the ich as well as killing most of it. if, after lowering the sg the fish gets worse then you can consider adding copper. but, you should also evaluate to be sure it isn't marine velvet - while hypo treatment will kill ich, velvet thrives in it. I'm guessing your diagnosis is correct right now, but if you notice things getting worse, don't rule out velvet - in which case the treatment is different.

[reefmontalvo]

based on where the tang is right now, hypo is your best bet. Be sure you have hiding spots in your QT - this is usually done with large PVC fittings. If the fish is feeling stressed, it will tend to allow the ich to show itself better. for hypo treatment, bring the sg down to 1.010. hold it there for 4 - 6 weeks. keep up with your topoff because if it goes up to 1.012 or higher, you'll need to start over. That sg should allow the fish to fight off the ich as well as killing most of it. if, after lowering the sg the fish gets worse then you can consider adding copper. but, you should also evaluate to be sure it isn't marine velvet - while hypo treatment will kill ich, velvet thrives in it. I'm guessing your diagnosis is correct right now, but if you notice things getting worse, don't rule out velvet - in which case the treatment is different.

 

I recommend the same treatment. Or you could call BRK and ask what they might to in this case.

[cabrego]

Right now, I still have her in the QT and I do have some hiding spots that I made for her using pottery from my FW days. She is taking to it and she is eating well still so, I hope she can fight it off on her own.

 

 

I emailed BRK and linked them to this thread hopefully they have a chance to respond later.

[johnnybv]

Right now, I still have her in the QT and I do have some hiding spots that I made for her using pottery from my FW days. She is taking to it and she is eating well still so, I hope she can fight it off on her own.

 

 

I emailed BRK and linked them to this thread hopefully they have a chance to respond later.

 

The tang came out of a system that was already at 1.012, so I would have to say the stress of the move has brought it on. As stated above, lower the salinity to 1.012 to 1.010, feed strong with a high quality food laced with garlic. I like to use the Dainichi pellets, with garlic and Selcon. I would use cupramine as a last resort, but they tangs dont doo well long term in copper. Get him on a good feedign routine several times a day, and he should come back pretty quick.

John

[Brian Ward]

The tang came out of a system that was already at 1.012, so I would have to say the stress of the move has brought it on. As stated above, lower the salinity to 1.012 to 1.010, feed strong with a high quality food laced with garlic. I like to use the Dainichi pellets, with garlic and Selcon. I would use cupramine as a last resort, but they tangs dont doo well long term in copper. Get him on a good feedign routine several times a day, and he should come back pretty quick.

John

 

yep, sounds like stress of the move as well as increasing the salinity (don't know how long you acclimated) So bring the salinity back down (even though it's eating well, bringing the salinity down will reduce the amount of energy the fish has to use to maintain osmotic balance and allow it to concentrate that energy on fighting the ich - the hypo will also kill the ich. remember that even if a fish isn't showing signs, that doesn't mean the ich is gone. you don't want to transfer to your display if at all possible).

[cabrego]

The tang came out of a system that was already at 1.012, so I would have to say the stress of the move has brought it on. As stated above, lower the salinity to 1.012 to 1.010, feed strong with a high quality food laced with garlic. I like to use the Dainichi pellets, with garlic and Selcon. I would use cupramine as a last resort, but they tangs dont doo well long term in copper. Get him on a good feedign routine several times a day, and he should come back pretty quick.

John

 

 

Thanks for the input. I will slowly lower the salinty. She is eating new life specturm A+ which is suppose to be good for the immune system and I am also giving her algae on a clip. She seems to prefer the pellets though she only picks at the algae every now and then.

[zygote2k]

If the fish is otherwise healthy. start upping the salinity to the level of your DT and let the fish ride it out. It will strengthen its' immune system and be better off in the long run. Running hypo salinity only makes sense if you are trying to save money on salt.

[ctenophore]

Running hypo salinity only makes sense if you are trying to save money on salt.

It also makes sense when you want to keep your display tank free of ich, which is typically a good thing for people who value the lives of their other fish.

[zygote2k]

Stable water chemistry and good animal husbandry go a long way towards preventing ick outbreaks. In the last year I've had only a 6" Hippo Tang get ick and I let him ride it out. The other fish weren't affected and now his immune system is stronger against future ick outbreaks.

[cabrego]

Well, I am sad to report this fish did not make it

She was doing well ( I thought ) and the ich seemed to dissappear, but I noticed the skin of the fish was off in color and kind of white almost. I think the ich caused either a velvet or some kind of fungus and she quickly declined and passed. Also, I have lost two of the 3 baby clown fish that were in the holding tank with her, appeared to die of the same secondary problem (no signs of ich).

 

Towards the end the fish just began to lie on the bottom of the tank and spontaneously have a burst of energy and swim to the top then go back down and then die...so I basically lost a purple tang and 2 baby clowns so far. I will likely come home to a 3rd dead clown.

 

 

This hobby can be too sad sometimes!

 

I guess, next time I see signs of ich I will go with a copper hospital tank...

Edited May 4, 2009 by cabrego

[bkl911]

Sorry to hear about your losses. You tried your best!

[Mich]

It also makes sense when you want to keep your display tank free of ich, which is typically a good thing for people who value the lives of their other fish.

 

Lowering SG enough will kill all the reproductive stages of cryptocaryon, just as it will kill most other marine invertibrates and protists. However, removing an infested animal from a display system and putting it in a seperate hyposystem is really only treating the animal and not the display. You'll be killing the tomonts on the animal in hypo, but your display will still be full of free swimming tomites. Waiting for the tomites to die of starvation can take in excess of several weeks or months. Do you really want to keep a fish in hypo that long? You might think that UV sterilization will expedite this process, but in my experience it doesn't. These things hug the rock and the substrate and only a minority of them are getting pulled into the plumbing.

 

Consider that most people slap their Hypo Tanks together over night using small aquaria and minimal filtration. Stress tends to be the factor which causes fish to become suceptable to infection in the first place. It seems only reasonable that the stress of putting an animal in this type of system is only going to exacerbate the pre-existing stress which facilitated the original infection. Unless one has a constantly setup, loaded, large, fully cycled, +six month old hypo system, then it's not likely that this technique will yeild high levels of success. I think for the most part, I tend to agree with Zygote on this issue.

[ctenophore]

If you hypo qt all incoming fish from the beginning, your display system will be ich free. I agree that removing an infected fish from a stable display to a newly setup hypo tank is typically a bad idea. But this notion that ich is always present in a system is false. It can be avoided with proper care.

[Mich]

I agree, if you have a newly setup display system that's been sitting idle for a few months without fish, there will likely be no cryptocaryon or other ich causing species of cilliates within. If you have an established QT system that's setup all the time with hyposalinity and otherwise pristine water quality and you hypo treat every new addition that goes into the main system without fail, then that would most likely be an effective way of preventing protistan parasites from entering your main display. However, this obligates one to constantly abide by a very strict quarantine procedure.

 

Also, while it seems to me that this is an effective means of preventing marine ich and other white spot protistan diseases exclusively, it does not help the specimen being quarantined from contracting secondary bacterial and fungal infections from stress induced by multiple acclimatization periods. That being said, you are only endangering one quarantined specimen and not your entire display community.

 

I don't think there is much of a debate about whether or not hyposalinity works, it definitely killls the bugs. However, I'm new to this community and prior to joining WAMAS and checking out these forums I didn't have much contact with other serious hobbyists. I'm finding it very suprising how certain topics like hyposalinity have such a universally accepted consensus. Not that hypo is not effective if applied correctly in appropriate circumstances, but to me it seems like a lot of people are misapplying it and at the first sign of white spots they're dropping their already sick fish into inadequately sized, poorly established systems and sealing their fate.

 

I'm very sorry for cabregos loss and I hate for anyone to have to deal with the death of multiple, beautiful, expensive pets. However, it suprised me that the majority of responses to the original post mostly advocated putting the tang back into hypo when it had just been recently removed from a hypo system prior to the onset of ich. I've found that if the fish is still eating and the water parameters in the main system are ideal, then nine times out of ten it will beat the ich (I have seen the one in ten a couple of times though). In eleven years of keeping saltwater aquaria I've never had to deal with a break out of ich in any of my at home personal systems and I almost never quarantine. I've found that if you maintain reef quality water parameters and buy healthy looking feeding specimens which have already been pre-quarantined at the lfs (always avoid mail ordering) and are adding them to appropriately sized and stocked sytems, you generally wont have any issues.

 

Granted, this advice is mostly applicable to smaller scale hobbyists like myself, who are only running a couple medium sized systems in their homes. If you're a professional running a retail business and you're unloading boxes of ten dollar, atrociously infected, yellow tangs from Segrest Farms every week, you have no alternative but to quarantine aggressively. But, then again you're also less likely to be as emotionally affected by the death of three individual fish.