Where did it come from?

[jmm]

I did another water change last night and the fish appearance and behavior are improved this morning. Maybe water changes are diluting at least the free-swimming stages and allowing the fish a little relief. We'll see.

That's 4 20% changes.

 

[MondoBongo]

so maybe i misread this, but have you not been doing water changes until recently?

 

[iluvmyfishes]

Could be something bacterial that accumulated in the dead areas which can suddenly cause problems when stirred up, or hidden parasite in gills especially if they are scratching. Make sure your tank had good flow and your caves are open enough not to be stagnant. At this point I would just remove any inverts/coral and treat all your fish in your DT immediately. Better to save your fish and go FOWLR for a while than lose them.

 

[jmm]

Could be something bacterial that accumulated in the dead areas which can suddenly cause problems when stirred up, or hidden parasite in gills especially if they are scratching. Make sure your tank had good flow and your caves are open enough not to be stagnant. At this point I would just remove any inverts/coral and treat all your fish in your DT immediately. Better to save your fish and go FOWLR for a while than lose them.

There were no invertebrates except two fire shrimp when this started. However, I had already ordered a cleanup crew and it arrived during this episode. It included hermits and snails. Like an idiot (and not wanting to throw away 75 dollars), I put them in. It would be impossible to treat with copper now but I don't really know about hypo salinity. Does that kill snails and hermits (and the two shrimp)?

There are still some fish that show no sign of the disease. And the three that do are no worse.

 

[jmm]

so maybe i misread this, but have you not been doing water changes until recently?

I really hadn't but the tank didn't have a heavy load and to me it seemed like no time since it had been set up with all fresh salt water. I should have but it was so perfect and so were the fish until this outbreak. The protein skimmer was/is removing beautiful skim. The biological filtration was good, even with nitrate (probably because of the block of ceramic media in the sump).

I religiously do 30 gallon water changes on my reef tank every Sunday. That tank gives no problems and has healthy fish, SPS, and LPS. It's 210 gallon. There are no cross-contaminate tools used between these two tanks and they are on different floors of the house.

 

[iluvmyfishes]

I have run copper with cleaner shrimp and it did not kill them, but the snails would have to be removed. You can QT just the affected ones but I would definitely start medicating their food at least in the DT. That way they can all get treatment. If you see the others start to get sick you need to use your DT as a QT since your QT will not hold them all at one time.

 

[MondoBongo]

Well if the water changes were spotty it could be a chemistry issue. Alkalinity is an important component of fish maintaining their slime coats. With hardier fish like your clowns, they will probably fare better, but with more delicate fish, perhaps an alk drop was irritating them?

 

[jmm]

So, do more water changes? I've done four 20% in the last few days.

A lot of the snails are buried in the sand now.

Are there food medicines that work? I saw a frozen food for $22 that claimed it was for ich and other afflictions. I thought it was hype. Would you try that?

 

[MondoBongo]

I would probably start with tracking on your alkalinity. It's just a theory right now, so maybe monitor it for a couple weeks, testing every days to try to establish a trend.

It could be that it is getting eaten up and causing a negative impact on some of the more sensitive fish.

It's also entirely possible that alkalinity is not the issue, but at least it's a start and you should be able to eliminate it fairly quickly

 

[jmm]

Wow! Alkalinity! I never would have thought of that with no stony corals or clams in the tank. But you know what? Even with the 4 water changes the alkalinity was 5.5. That's low. I added Kent Super Buffer. I'll check later to see what happens.

 

[jmm]

The buffer last night only brought the alkalinity up to 7 so I dosed again and checked a little later and I was at 10. We'll see if that holds.

This is day 7 with no fatalities and no loss of appetite.

 

[jmm]

May have lost one - the Indian Ocean Teardrop. It was the smallest and the first to show problems. I haven't seen it since yesterday.

 

[jmm]

I did lose the Indian Ocean Teardrop. It has now been 11 days. The Mitratus is the most affected of the butterflies. The Tinkeri is next, but he is not nearly as bad. The Pearlscale is not visibly affected but he does scratch sometimes.

The foxface, wrasse and clown show no symptoms. They all come up to eat but the Mitratus has cloudy eyes and misses some of the food.

I've had a fish trap in there for several days but nobody goes in. They're too busy swimming in front of the powerheads.

I did another 20% water change.

 

[jmm]

The Mitratus and Tinkeri got week enough and had cloudy vision so the Foxface started nipping at their tails and fins. (I hate that fish) They were easy to catch and euthanize. Finally, a couple of days ago the Pearlscale showed symptoms. He went down in a hurry. When blind, I caught him. Now on day 22 the only fish I have are the Pygmy Wrasse and the Foxface. The wrasse is seemingly unaffected so far. The Foxface has a few black dots (like the black ich you see on Yellow Tangs, but it doesn't seem to be hurting him).

I'm convinced there was some ich in the tank off and on, but because of the eroded fins, the slime, and the fin eruptions, I think the most serious disease was velvet. We'll see if anybody survives it. I certainly wouldn't mind losing the Foxface. The trap is still in there but the only thing that goes in it is a hermit crab.

 

[snorvich]

Time line and behavioral symptoms sound like velvet.

 

[microlady]

And don't expect this to be done by qualified staff, down there it's most likely some minimum wage "Mexican" handlers.
.

Really? This is so offensive.

 

[jmm]

When I first saw signs of a disease in the tank, I started dropping the food from above and being very careful not to put my hands in the tank since I have other tanks. I lost all but two fish, a pigmy wrasse and a foxface. And the foxface had black spots and had lost all his color. The wrasse seemed okay. Both of them hid constantly and only came out for food. I was waiting for them to die. The tank grew algae like crazy all of a sudden.

And then, when I was feeding them their pellets I accidentally touched the water. Zap! It knocked me back with a very strong electric shock. By turning off everything electric that actually touched the water and getting shocked viciously to test it, I found it was the heater introducing the electricity to the water. I removed it and there was no shock.

I did a search for stray voltage on reefcentral and read a lot but there was too much to read it all and most of what I read was small voltage shocks. Mine was full-on, body shaking size voltage. Has anybody read about strong voltage leaks, here?

So, in the last 3 days the fish quit hiding, the color and behavior of the foxface returned to normal and the tank temperature dropped from 78° to 74.6° and has stayed stable.

So what happened here? Did I really lose my fish to a disease that was never exactly like ich, never exactly like flukes, and never exactly like velvet? Or was it electric shock all along?

Somebody smarter than me needs to advise here.

The fish are now beautiful and all the algae faded out over two days.