alg
Community Member
We received a gorgeous bonded pair of crosshatch triggers today from LiveAquaria Diver's Den. Unfortunately, as soon as we acclimated them and put them in our quarantine system, we noticed that the male had a massive swath of white patchy...something! We've had a lot of fish get sick over the years and never seen anything quite like it!
It kind of looks like skin is peeling / flaking off, like a really bad sunburn, but doesn't really look like it's the actual skin so much as something ON the skin that's peeling off.... hard to tell. It's mostly concentrated on the front of the body, but there are also patches on his back and fins. It doesn't seem cotton-y, like a fungus, and it doesn't really look like typical brooklynella. It's definitely not ich
A marine biologist friend of ours suggested it might have been a parasite infection that had a secondary bacterial or fungal infection, but almost impossible to say without a sample.
It only appears on one side of the body (which to me indicates it might have been a physical injury that got infected, like a bad scrape up against a rock??). Also, the female currently doesn't seem to show signs of it, and they DO seem to be an actual bonded pair (staying very close to each other).
Another interesting point just for kicks -- we like to look at our corals under blue light with a yellow filter (who doesn't?), and we thought what the heck we'll look at the triggers, and weirdly we discovered that there actually seems to be some bioluminescence in parts of the infected areas. Not all over, just concentrated near the dorsal fin (it's the bright orange glow in the photo below)
The fish aren't eating yet, but they did just get shipped across the country so that's not uncommon. They don't look too thin and aren't breathing very heavily.
We've done a freshwater dip on him, hard to say if it's helped, maybe a little. He's in a 55gal tank running copper for now so we'll see how he looks in the morning.
It kind of looks like skin is peeling / flaking off, like a really bad sunburn, but doesn't really look like it's the actual skin so much as something ON the skin that's peeling off.... hard to tell. It's mostly concentrated on the front of the body, but there are also patches on his back and fins. It doesn't seem cotton-y, like a fungus, and it doesn't really look like typical brooklynella. It's definitely not ich
A marine biologist friend of ours suggested it might have been a parasite infection that had a secondary bacterial or fungal infection, but almost impossible to say without a sample.It only appears on one side of the body (which to me indicates it might have been a physical injury that got infected, like a bad scrape up against a rock??). Also, the female currently doesn't seem to show signs of it, and they DO seem to be an actual bonded pair (staying very close to each other).
Another interesting point just for kicks -- we like to look at our corals under blue light with a yellow filter (who doesn't?), and we thought what the heck we'll look at the triggers, and weirdly we discovered that there actually seems to be some bioluminescence in parts of the infected areas. Not all over, just concentrated near the dorsal fin (it's the bright orange glow in the photo below)
The fish aren't eating yet, but they did just get shipped across the country so that's not uncommon. They don't look too thin and aren't breathing very heavily.
We've done a freshwater dip on him, hard to say if it's helped, maybe a little. He's in a 55gal tank running copper for now so we'll see how he looks in the morning.
