Sharkks, thank you, If you do this for long enough, by default you have to learn something. I probably have kept a few of every fish that has ever been kept in a reef and of course killed most of them, the rest either died of old age or I gave them away, sometimes to a public aquarium.
As I said, some of my fish are 19 years old, many people,(or maybe most) think my ideas can't possably work and I am just very lucky. Maybe I am.
But if you have followed my posts for the last ten years then either you have no life or you may be interested in what I am saying. Or of course you are amused and can't wait until my tank crashes from either fungus, hair algae, power shortage, nuclear fallout, white ich, black ich, blue ich, flatworms, oval worms, ringworm, sguare worm, phosphate, nitrate, kryptonite, diatoms, red tide, or fleas. I have never reported in all these years an episode of these things although I have bought many fish with these malady's. Maybe not fleas or nuclear fallout but then again, I can't remember.
This week I bought a copperband butterfly from a store that had about 20 of them and it was less then $10.00. They were that price because they all had a pretty advanced case of ich. Ich means nothing to me as I feel all fish, or almost all fish have it. I did not yet put this copperband in my reef, not that I am worried about my fish getting it, but because this fish was in a store with copper and I can tell it had ich. Copperbands are never that cheap and that store lost a lot of fish from that shipment so they wanted to sell them before they died. If I put him in my reef, he would be very uncomfortable and stressed as the paracites would probably have covered his gills and killed him in a few days. That fish is now fine and eating all the worms I give him. In a few days he will join my other copperband and either kill each other of live in piece but whatever happens, I saved this fish and got a great buy.
I don't have a hospital tank or quarantine tank so I had to dig one out. I am also using my copper from a bottle that is at least 25 years old and I am not even sure the stuff is still good.
I certainly don't want or condone buying fish with ich. Or putting in fish without quarantine. (I am very lucky like that) But it would have died in the store and I hate to see such a beautiful animal just waste away like that. If I had the room I would have bought all of them.
A disease like ich can easily be cured with copper, even a copperband butterfly that people say is sensitive to copper. If I had my favorite medicine "quinicrine Hydrocloride" I would have mixed that with the copper and the fish would be cleared of ich in a day.
I also wanted to run my diatom filter on this tank continousely but out of my 3 diatoms I can barely get one working. I put the parts together from all 3 and got one to barely work and I am testing it now. If you can run a diatom on a tank with ich, the paracite will be removed as it leaves the fish, but as I said, diatom problems. When I get time I will re design a new diatom filter but for now, I will have to do this the old fashioned way.
