need to id disease, is it bacterial?

dohc97

dohc97

Active member
im going to post 2 pics with great regret of my dead angelfish. Whatever this is it started with a red blotch and would like to know what happened before i get any new fish. This is the second fish it happens to in the same qt tank, both came from the same store. Just really at a loss, and would like to do my best so this doesnt happen to my next fish.

deadfish004.jpg


deadfish001.jpg


in the pictures the fish has been dead about a day, i knew this was coming but had to leave town for a couple days. I did see the beginning of this and knew he would go down just like the other fish before him.
 
The pictures aren't real clear. (Not complaining, some cameras just do better than others.)

Did the red spot start small and then spread (how long to spread) or did it suddenly appear this size? Does it look a haemorrhage to you? Is it on the surface of the fish or deeper in its skin?

Right and below the red spot, there appears to be a string-type thing. Is that a bristle worm feeding or some sort of parasite on the fish?

I assume you tested your water in the QT?

Did you go back to the fish store to see if they had this in other fish or is it isolated to your QT tank?
 
sorry about the pictures, more of my haste than anything because the fish was allready stinky. It started as a bit of a bump and slight redness on the side of the fish under the skin. In total it took 3 days for it to kill this fish, the previous fish died within 2 days. The picture is not clear but the red spot is actually an open wound, it literally looks as if something ate its way right out of the fish, like if i sliced a chunk of the fish away with a knife. The stringy thing is just disintegration of the flesh, no parasite that i could see. All water parameters are fine in the qt, im just trying to figure out a way to prevent this or to make sure that its not still alive in my qt.
 
dohc97,

I think I may have responded to you earlier, or perhaps it was another angelfish?

That lesion is a classic example of a "Uronema" infection. I put that in quotes because identifying ciliate protozoans is difficult. The organism I'm discussing is an oblong ciliate, about 40 um long. It may not be Uronema at all, but thats what we call it.

Now - without doing a wet scrape and looking at it under a microscope NOBODY can tell you if it is or is not for certain, but IMO, all signs point to it.

Uronema can begin as an internal or an external protozoan infection. Your fish seems to have had the internal type. The protozoans live between the cells of the fish, and the lesion seems to grow from within, then breaking out to the surface of the fish and getting larger. It is usually fatal within three days of the onset of symptoms. I saw an 88% mortality rate in a group of chromis that had it - despite all treatments. Which BTW, hyposalinity makes it worse.

One treatment I think holds promise is chloroquine - but that will whack your biological filtration, so it is difficult to use.


Uronema is present in just about every aquarium - nobody knows why it shows up in some fish. One idea is that since the lesions start off looking like a bruise, and since it happens mainly to new fish, that it is caused by a fish net hitting the side of the fish. While I cannot rule that out 100%, I think it is just coincidental.

Jay
 
That photo just makes me cringe!

Of all the problems we fish keepers go through,that type of bacterial infection,is just a literal "killer".

Jay,does it seem that this type of infection is more prevalent in Bflys and angels than any other type of marinefish?
 
Re: what types of fish can get Uronema -

My article on Uronema has been stuck on my editor's desk for like three months - I can't just print it out here, because they make you sign a "first use" agreement. But - at least here is the list of fish families that I write about having seen Uronema in:

.....seen only six families of fishes (in roughly descending order of frequency): Pomacentridae (damselfish, specifically of the genus Chromis), Serranidae (subfamily Anthiinae the Anthias), Syngnathidae (seahorses and seadragons) Labridae, (the wrasses) Chaetodontidae, (the butterflyfish) and occasionally, in Pomacanthidae, the angelfish. There are no doubt other species of fish that can be infected. Most of the fish involved tend to have large, loosely attached cycloid scales, .....

- Remember, this is not a bacterial disease, but a protozoan. Also, you cannot visually tell Uronema from a Vibrio bacterial disease - for that you need a microscope. Worse yet, I've seen Vibrio and Uronema at the same time!


Jay
 
JHemdal

I really appreciate your informative answers. I believe you probably answered this for someone else as i had not posted about this problem. What could i do to prevent this in the future since this is the second time it happens?
I was thinking of just tearing the qt down, washing the lr with bleach and starting a new cycle?
My next fish will be coming from les at wetpets but i want to give it the best chance possible, i wont be ordering this fish until the first week of february.
 
dohc97,

Yah - the other angelfish I was thinking about was a Griffith's a week or two ago (same genus of fish).

I really don't know what to tell you as to how to prevent it.

I don't think that stripping the tank and starting over is warranted - like I said, this critter can be isolated from almost any aquarium, it feeds on bacteria normally - for some reason it just goes wild and starts eating fish tissue.

Here is an excerpt from the treatment section from my article:

Copper treatments may reduce the numbers of these ciliates, but good control is not seen until ionic copper levels reach 0.23 ppm, and this too close to the lethal limit for many species of fish. Formalin baths of various concentration and duration have been proposed, but this treatment is also mostly effective against external Uronema....It seems that the best control of Uronema may be found by dosing formalin at 75 ppm for three hours, and then changing enough of the aquarium’s water to reduce the formalin level to the well-tolerated 25 ppm level (by changing 66% of the aquarium’s water). Remember to take into account the length of time to perform the water change into the three hour treatment time (for example, if it takes one hour to drain and fill the tank, you would need to begin that task beginning after the second hour of the treatment).

The article also talks about using chloroquine, but that is not routinely available to home aquarists any longer (Used to be sold as Marex).


Jay
 
Jay,
So we cannot simply wait out the lifecycle of this protozoan as we do with a host-specific parasite,like ich?.

If the protozoan is present in tanks as a part of the ecosystem,and i am interpreting your info correctly,then a fish with a immune system that is functioning normally, should be able to fight off this protozoan?.
 
Correct,

You cannot wait out Uronema, it will just feed on bacteria in the absence of fish to feed on. Yes, the current thought is that since it is found in almost every tank, that the fish's own resistance can normally fight it off. Hyposalinity is one way to bring it on. As I mentioned, "net bruises" have been another suggestion - I'm just not so sure about that.
One more thing - while Uronema is found in most every tank the NUMBERS found can have a bearing on fish getting infected or not. Keeping the hospital tank free of uneaten food and feces seems to help. Also, infected fish can apparently shed enough Uronema to cause other healthy fish to become "overwhelmed" and get sick themselves....

Jay
 
thanks to both of you for all the info. According to that article the best thing i can do is just tear this tank down and clean it out with bleach. thanks again to both of you, your help is greatly appreciated, dont know what i would do without rc.
 
discusone,

Many thanks for that link - I don't believe that I've seen that web page before. I'm glad that some of the people that I've spoken with about this issue over the years were referenced in the page (Thom Demas, Pete G., and Dr. Dove) Way too often, I've seen Internet pages that tell people to use hyposalinity to treat this - which is exactly the opposite thing to do! Rand Kollman's article was mentioned in which he suggested that hyposalinity *could* be used, but I believe this was an error.

dohc97 - I'm still not convinced that you actually need to nuke that tank - but if you do, the only real problem you'll incurr is the time required to restablish the biological filtration system...

Jay
 
Jay,

do you actually think that a particular strain of this protozoan could have been brought in with some live rock?

fish were fine in qt until the addition of 2 pieces of lr from a friends sump, i remember him telling me he lost a school of chromis and did not know how it happened........

going by what you wrote we are pretty sure this protozoan is ever present, could the new lr have introduced a strain that for whatever reason wanted to attack fish?
 
dohc97,

If the loss of the chromis took place around the time you got the live rock, then that is possible. A lot still needs to be learned about this disease - the problem is that there are so many oval ciliates in aquariums that it is difficult to tell them apart. It may be that there is one really nasty species, but that it looks a lot like the others, so has been misidentified.
I did have a case where a group of green chromis contracted this in a quarantine system and the yellowtail blue damsels in the same system were fine, but a parrotfish that have lived in the system for months prior with no problems - caught it from the chromis. So in that case, it was contagious.

Jay
 
Jay,

You mentioned earlier in the thread that you dont think i should tear down this tank, what would be your way of treating this system? there are no fish in as of now, its a bare bottom tank with lr and a hob filter for mechanical and carbon filtering. Would it be wise to try hypersalinity for a few days and a lower temperature? The main display by the way has not been affected and im being very careful to not put anything in there that has touched the qt.

Jose
 
I am trying to delete my post, but am not able to do so. Is there a moderator here?? My account is not working properly.
 
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