Angelfish and copper

[kj5432]

Other than the normal arguements for not using copper, has anyone ever heard that copper is bad for Angelfish?

I bought a potter's angel and last night I started running copper as a preventative measure. The calculated dosage for my qt tank was 31.25ml of the copper product that I purchased. I added 26ml instead of the full dosage. Will that be ok?

 

[Wolverine]

I just replied to your other post, but I can copy it here:

I don't know if I would go so far as to say that it's certain death for all angels, but they do tend to be more sensitive to copper than many other fish. Some species do seem to be hypersensitive to it, such as the lemonpeel, flame, japanese (interruptus), multicolor, and a few others; for these fishes, there as likely to survive ich on their own as they are to survive the copper treatment. I don't remember over the top of my head if Potter's is one of the extra-sensitive ones or not (Scott Michael talks about this a little in his Angelfishes & Butterflyfishes book, and he prefers hyposalinity for treating angels).

IIRC, the Genicanthus angels are less susceptible to problems with copper than the other angels, and the Centropyge angels ("pygmy") are the worst.

Dave

 

[Wolverine]

Underdosing copper is worse than not using it at all. It will not be effective in treating disease, but it can still expose the fish to enough copper to do damage.

Dave

 

[BTTRFLYGRL]

I wouldn't treat the Angel unless its necessary...and then I would NOT treat with copper ..I would use Hypo..Potters don't have the best survival record, why take the chance ..Keep water pristine, feed a good variety of foods, soak food in vitamins and only treat if it shows signs of parasite or illness..

 

[Wolverine]

Here's the last post I made to your other thread, just so all the information is out there.

One thing I would do is read this.

Steve did a nice review on Ich, and the treatment options. There's a second part to the article also.

At some point he also did an article on quarantining fish, and the methods he uses. He uses hyposalinity with fish at high risk of getting ich.

As for your situation, I would do one of two things. One would be to bump the copper up to the therapeutic range. Before you do that, test the copper level yourself. That will give you more information than what is on the side of the bottle (Steve's article above gives the various therapeutic windows from different authors).
The other option would be to forgo the copper side of things, and switch to hyposalinity. Whether or not you would actively remove the copper at this point would be up to you. The process of making the tank hyposaline would significantly reduce the concentration anyway.

If it were my tank, I would go with the latter, for numerous reasons.

I don't know anything about that product in particular. In general, I'm suspicious of claims like that, since they often don't have any true justification for their quantification (ie, how did they decide that this was 60X less toxic for fish?).

Dave

 

[LargeAngels]

IME using Cupramine copper is fine for even the more sensitive pygmy angels such as multicolors and coloni. But I would NOT use other copper treatments on these fish. Cupramine is much less toxic to the fish and extremely affective at curing ich or velvet.

Hypo is only good for ich and not velvet. Velvet also reproduces at a much higher rate than ich.

You are best off to put the potters in a quarentine tank by itselves, w/out medicine and with live rock and alge covered rocks. Then try some frozen cyclopeeze and freshly hatched brine shrimp. If you see ich or velvet then treat appropriately.

 

[Angel*Fish]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7377758#post7377758 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by LargeAngels


You are best off to put the potters in a quarentine tank by itselves, w/out medicine and with live rock and alge covered rocks. .

Good advice