Assistance with a Blue Tang with HLLE

[JPM San Diego]

Hello. I suspect a nutritional deficiency, however I am open to suggestions. I would love to hear from someone with success at reversing HLLE in a blue tang. Here the history:

My blue tang is 14 months old. It is a tank raised blue tang from Biota. It grew rapidly to its current size and other than having HLLE, its behavior is normal. HLLE began very mildly at 2 months of age and has progressed slowly ever since. At that time, I was using a high-quality carbon. I stopped using carbon and never resumed it.

On the advice of my consultant, 8 months ago I increased the quantity of food to 6 cubes of frozen food per day. Each meal includes 1 cube of San Francisco Bay Brand Emerald Entrée and 1 cube from their variety pack – other than the Emerald Entrée. I also feed 4 sheets of Nori per day.

Emerald Entrée ingredients: brine shrimp, mysis shrimp, plankton, krill, spinach, romaine lettuce, red-leaf lettuce, spirulina, menhaden oil, brewers dried yeast, and vitamins
Variety Cubes:
Marine Cuisine – similar to emerald entrée but without the plant material.
Brine Shrimp – just brine shrimp, fish oil, carrageenan.
Plankton – just plankton and carrageenan.

Using AquaBiomics, I tested the water for parasites and for pathogenic bacteria. Nothing found. My other inhabitants are doing well and growing nicely. The only fish losses in last year were two Pink square anthias. Neither anthia, nor any other fish in the tank exhibit HLLE.

Aquarium is 200 gallons (total volume). Tankmates include 4 yellow tangs, 1 Kole tang, 1 Tomini tang, 1 foxface, 1 copperbanded butterflyfish, 1 pink square anthias, 2 ocellaris clownfish, 2 Bangaii cardinal fish, 2 diamond gobies, 1 blackline blenny, 1 orchid dottyback, 1 court jester goby, 1 royal gramma, and 1 mandarin dragonette. Overall tank is peaceful and no fish is exhibiting aggression toward the blue tang.

Tank Parameters
Temp 77.6 to 79.7
Salinity 1.026 to 1.027
pH 8.04 to 8.23
Alkalinity 8.0 to 8.5
Calcium 400 to 450
Nitrate 10 to 20
Phosphate 0.22 to 0.27

 

[george9]

Have you checked for stray voltage in the tank by chance? I know Biota sells 'blemished' blue tangs, which tells me they must have a lot of these cases themselves. I wonder if this condition is just due to issues with being tank raised. I know a lot of the early Biota yellow tangs had pretty bad HLLE/epithelial thinning and I don't think they've been breeding blue tangs very long, but I could be wrong on that.
My Biota yellow tang came to me with minor HLLE or epithelial thinning and nothing I do has been able to reverse it, although it also hasn't gotten worse. I did get a larger size fish rather than the small quarter ones.

I would recommend getting Vitachem and Selcon and soaking some New Life Spectrum pellets in it for an extra nutritional boost every few days. It sounds like you're already feeding a great diet though.

 

[jason2459]

It may never fully heal. My yellow belly got HLLE fairly rapidly about 8 years ago. I was using either ROX or acid washed lignite. I removed it and it didn't get worse. Can't prove the GAC was the cause but removed it out of caution.

8 years later there is a small black spot barely noticable but dorsal fin never fully came back.

Can see it's still eroded away and will probably always be like this

 

[Spare time]

If you need a carbon with low dust content that also isn't brittle, red sea carbon works very well for that. I had a tang get hlle twice and both I think were from rox (both occured when I switched to rox but the first one had some rox grind in a reactor by accident tand the second time the rox wasn't rinsed by the person who swapped the carbon. I've never had the issue with red sea carbon which I used the rest of the time.