Brook?

roadrunner12

New member
I recently got a A. Ocellaris clown and first day went by without him eating. Second day still didn't eat. By the third day in quarantine he developed something I haven't seen yet in books or dealers tanks. He has a white crustacean along his lateral line only. It protrudes slightly making it look like his scales there are raised and dead white. Also, i noticed before I added him that there was a white grainy looking organism eating all the diatom algae off the glass. These are the size of juvenile copepods, but they are not copepods pretty sure. Now the bottom is littered w/ thousands of these things and the diatoms are almost completely consumed. What puzzles me is that the salty looking organism looks the same as what is on the clown. Pretty sure it isn't C. Irritans or Amyloodinium either, unless Oodinium targets the latteral line, which I know not to be true from literature. So the riddle is, What eats diatoms, infects the lateral line, and appears like tiny grains of salt. I know using the term grains of salt is going to invoke a Oodinium or Crypto response, but I really don't think that is what it is. Thought it might be Brooklynella, but not sure now. Can anyone out there please help cause I'm going crazy trying to figure out what it could be? My quarantine is a simple 10gal. glass tank with wet/dry hang-on filter. no substrate and no rock. Just A few PVC pipes and plastic decor for hiding places. Thanks.
 
What is eating your diatoms is likely different than what is infecting your fish.

Brooklynella what the fish look like they are coated in a thick mucus layer. If your clownfish was wild-caught, the chances of Brooklynella are high. The best treatment is a formalin bath.
 
So now that it has been a few days, it's starting to look like lymphocystis or a fungal infection. This isn't as serious as Brooklynella right? What would be eating all the brown algae then. Tank has been running maybe 2 months. First sign of brown algae, and these guys started showing up in the water column in 100's of thousands. They can't be copepods without a source of introduction like live rock right? I've never seen copepods consume algae like this.
 
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