Why not try to save the Flame while you have time? These fish were removed from their natural habitat; as conscientious aquarists we owe it to these fish to give them the best quality of life. Letting them die of disease without attempting treatment is not an ethical choice.
You have me caught in a struggle between "f it" and "BREEEEAAATH DAMN YOU, BREAAAATTHHHH"
in other news... clown #2 was going from laying on the bed, to gulping air, to laying on the bed. Was ~90 second cycle. I couldn't stand it, so.... :headwally:
I'm going to run around tomorrow and see how I can best setup QT w/o blowing hundreds & hundreds. If I can set it up, at a moments notice, for ~$150-$200, I'll probably do it.( and NOT enraging the beast which made me think this was a good idea in the first place)
Good news is, I'm in Miami. Bad news is, I'm in Miami.
My one remaining question is this. Both LFS have a communal water buying system. Gravity fed PVC pipes that deliver fresh/salinated water. The salinated water comes out ~1.028, but my question is how secure / clean this water might be?
As of tonight, Flame appears as healthy. Eyes are crystal clear, he's sleeping in his favorite cubby, & he was very grateful that I switched him over to mysis / brine, instead of freeze dried phosphate bombs.
Also... I swear both LFS claim to buy farm raised fish...
Diseased or not that flame angel is not going to live out a happy existence in that 14g biocube, and likely nothing else housed with it in a tank that size.
I agree with Deinonych in regards to trying to save the fish, you'll want to quarantine properly the next time you set up a tank so you might as well grab a little 10G tank, along with a cheap powerfilter, an airstone, some ammo lock, and some bottled bacteria(and alot of water just in case.) should be a little over 60 bucks but a flame angel alone goes for around 40 where i live, plus you'd have a proper quarantine setup once your done treating.
Flame was $30, and I straight up told the guy I had a cube w/ 4 LPS & 2 clowns, he didn't seem to care/worry (money)
Really though, I'm fixated on this ~100-150G tank that's just chilling in the back conference room at work... The big costs are just sitting inside of it, though it looks like it likely had a sump/refugium, based on the number of pumps it has... This would turn the biocube into a QT Cube.
I should probably move the $2,000 I was saving for Nvidia Pascal flagship GPUs over to setting this up properly...