maddog2002
New member
I have powder blue tang n my 135g Reef more than a year till now . He eats formula two pellet, Mysis and seaweed. He is fat and active. I love it.
I've had my PBT for close to 6 years now and love it :thumbsup:
It's in a 140 G tank with 2 Tunze 6100 on pulse mode.
Skimmer is an ATI BBM250. The tank is currently lit by 2*250W 14000K + 2*36W T8 blue lamps.
I wish I had a larger tank but unfortunately can't modify my set-up at the moment.
It is now about 5 inches and eats whatever I put in the tank, dry food, mysis, brine shrimps, nori...
He's getting along in the tank with other tangs, far too much would one say: purple tang (close to 10 years old), hippo (7,5 years), sohal (close to 7 years) and achilles (5 years).
They all get along quite well but I would not advise anybody to try to do like me.
For so many tangs, lot of open space + lot of water motion + lot of hiding places + very good feeding is very important in my opinion![]()
Powder blues IMO should be the last fish added. I am learning this through my experiences right now. Jjstecchino your probably going to have to do one of two things, either don't add anymore fish to your tank or you might have to replace your PBT. IMO whats going to happen is that your PBT will get stressed from chasing the other fish and sooner or later she will get ich. For some reason they love to chase fire fish, gobies, wrasses, and damsels.
I just picked up a 3.5 - 4" specimen yesterday from a LFS. It looked very healthy and was eating flake food at the LFS. I had a choice of 3 pbt's to choose from and picked a medium sized one. His fins were perfect, his body coloration was a good deep powder blue and not the pale, near white look that so many doomed PBTs have.
Trouble is, after putting him in my tank, I noticed about 5 hrs later that he had white spots/pimples on his body. He was not like this at the store nor did he have those while in the bag being acclimated.
I know these fish are ick magnets but can ick just appear like that in a few hours? Should I be concerned or simply feed with garlic extract soaked nori? I've heard they stress easily and get ick as a result....I suppose this is what happened. He is eating as of 2 hrs after being in the tank and appears very healthy, fins errect and roaming around exploring his tank.
Any advice? The tank is a 180 standard 6'x2'x2' with tons of flow. Approximately 67 times turn over. Huge skimmer and water parameters are excellent. He is the only big fish in the tank. Rest are chromis and 1 six-line.
THP you should not have put the PBT straight to your large display tank. Yes it is possible for a fish to develop ich spots just a few hours after being introduced, however make sure it is indeed ich. Sometime fine sand grains can stick especially to the front lateral fins and this can be interpreted as ich, so make sure before you do anything.
Keep in mind that ich is not a psychosomatic disease just caused by stress. In order to get ich either the fish has to be a carrier or there has to be cryptocaryon irritans in your tank. A carrier fish is one who has a stronger enough immune system to keep ich as a colonizing organism rather than causing clinical infection and death or a fish who has been kept on suboptimal concentration of copper, enough to keep ich from showing but not enough to kill it.
I believe that most fish at the LFS belong to this second category and it is reasonable to assume that most of the LFS tanks have ich (an LFS has an almost sure chance of receiving a fish with ich and running their system fallow for the 4 weeks necessary to treat ich would be highly impractical and treat all tanks with high dose copper would be expensive and impractical as well since delicate fish will have a low tolerance to copper.)
Given these premises the burden of preventing ich is on you and you do that with proper quarantining. You have a large tank and QT is easy and very little stressful for the fish if properly done. You use water from you main display and keeping good water quality on the QT tank is like doing more frequent water changes in your display for a while. Once you spend several thousands of dollars for your system investing a hundred dollars on a QT is cheap, and this is in addition to the moral obligation we owe to the animals we chose to keep.
At this point if you indeed have ich you can follow one of two avenues:
1) Keep the fish in, feed well and if you are lucky he may recover from ich. Ich however will remain in your DT and the PBT as well as any other fish new or old will be at some point getting ich when stressed and possibly cause the entire fish population getting ill and die. This tanks are all to common and usually when you hear arguments against quarantining (such as "I quarantined my new fish for 4 weeks, he was as healthy as it could be but as I introduced it in the DT he showed ich" , the usual conclusion is that quarantine is useless). Proponent of this kind of argument usually have one of these tanks ridden with ich.
2) second option which I would favor especially since you do not have many fish in at this point, is to take ALL the fish out. Place them in a QT/Hospital tank. Run your display fallow for 4-6 weeks, treat the fish in the hospital tank with the proper medication and then reintroduce them on the now ich free tank.
After this effort observe proper quarantining for anything you put in the tank. As much as possible consider that anything wet can carry crypto and act consequently.
As far as proper medications I tried cupramine in the past but I found it was quite stressful to the fish at the recommended dose confirmed by Cu test. It kills almost completely the biologic filter in the QT and water quality becomes a real issue unless you do daily or twice a day water changes with cupramine addition and testing. A real pain in the butt and very stressful to you and the fish.
Quinine Sulfate is as, if not, more effective than copper for treating ich.
Quinine works not only on the floating tomites but in my opinion also on the attached trophont (the grain of salt on the fish) since as the fish has been exposed to quinine the grain of salt disappear within a few hours to a day leaving a small pit in its place. I do not know if quinine works on the protomont ot tomont phase of ich it may or may not. I have not read any study on that. And I wish a study on this topic would come out since a medication surely effective on all 4 pases of ich would definitely simplify and reduce the length of treatment.
Quinine is much better tolerated by the fish and keeps your biologic filter intact since it is strictly an anti-protozoan (it is used for human malaria treatment) which does not kill bacteria, whereas copper is a wide spectrum germicidal that kills almost everything
Is quinine reef safe? The standard answer is no, however the truth is "dont know". There are anecdotal posts of people who have used quinine in their stocked reef without ill effects. More investigation on the topic is needed.
Good luck
Trouble is, with quarantines, one can never get a tank big enough and make it worthwill without spending nearly as much as the display.
I would not be so concerned at this point on what he eats. If he likes flakes so be it as far as he is eating. As he will get more established he is likely to sample different foods, especially if you have other tangs eating nori at some point he will not want to be left out and he'll eat that too.
They have a mind of their own and sometimes they like to do different from what WE think is best.