Please Help...very sick fish....

[MitchReef]

A friend has a really seriously ill fish. I'm actually just going to post a quote of his email to me....

"Tank consists of 3 good sized hippo tangs,
a blonde Naso
a harlequin
a maroon clown
a puffer
undulated trigger

One of the hippos has a serious skin/flesh disorder. No other fish are affected, the ill fish eats perfectly, swims and is very active and shows no signs of distress what so ever.

Here is how bad the fish is, it actually has chunks of flesh that fall off, it appears almost leprous. When swimming through current in the tank it often has chunks fly off its body. No part of the fish is more affected than another part and yet it appears to be a degenerative disease that isn't affecting anything else.
Ideas?"

Please help me get the good info for him and his poor hippo tang.

Thanks,
Mitch

 

[MitchReef]

wow....hard to believe....only one view and no replies....I thought this was the forum to go to with problems like these.....

 

[nuccadoc]

The first thing i would do is put some melefix in the tank. As serious as you make this out to be I would be very surprised that this fish survives. With his skin coming off makes him very susceptible to other diseases.

 

[MitchReef]

I feel the same way, I haven't seen the fish, it's a friend's tank. He figures the little guy is a goner, but wants to see about saving him. I'm thinking HLLE myself.

 

[RBU1]

Without pictures some things are hard to help with. If your friend has an established treatment tank I would remove the fish from the display and treat it with an antibiotic such as kanaplex. Make sure the treatment tank is established you dont want an ammonia spike on top of everything else.

 

[MitchReef]

I'm waiting on pics myself. As soon as I get them I will post them up.

 

[JHemdal]

Mitch,

I'm thinking along the lines that you are - if a fish is eating and swimming normally, yet has large lesions, that usually means they are superficial, and the most common of those issues is HLLE - and since its a hepatus tang, well, that points to it even more....just guessing here that the OP mistook something else for paricles of flesh falling off the fish, I've never seen that except in v ery deceased fish that had started to decay.

Jay