Fish Death Post Fallow Period

[Tidalwave]

Ok, so I finally received a voltage meter and I'm getting a reading of anywhere between 9-14 mA (I believe that's the correct unit). Adding the grounding probe takes it to 0.00.
What is interesting, however, is that the reading is not effected by unplugging any piece of equipment in my tank. Is there something I'm missing on finding out what might be causing the stray voltage besides just unplugging each piece of equipment and rechecking the reading? And would this kind of voltage be considered deadly?

 

[Humblefish]

Ok, so I finally received a voltage meter and I'm getting a reading of anywhere between 9-14 mA (I believe that's the correct unit). Adding the grounding probe takes it to 0.00.
What is interesting, however, is that the reading is not effected by unplugging any piece of equipment in my tank. Is there something I'm missing on finding out what might be causing the stray voltage besides just unplugging each piece of equipment and rechecking the reading? And would this kind of voltage be considered deadly?

Set your voltmeter to AC Volts, put one probe in the water and the second on a good ground. This should give you a V reading.

More info: http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showpost.php?p=15118033&postcount=5

 

[Tidalwave]

I apologize!
That is what I measured. I'm not at all versed with anything electrical :/.
I turned the voltage meter to the V~ (which to my understanding is measuring AC), and the numbers vary from 9-14.

 

[Paul B]

You guys are thinking too much into this. Copperbands are a particularly lousy fish to put in quarantine. They really hate it. It stresses them out and they get sick. A copperband is not a very delicate fish but they get a bad rap because of this. They need hiding places and real food.

 

[Humblefish]

I apologize!
That is what I measured. I'm not at all versed with anything electrical :/.
I turned the voltage meter to the V~ (which to my understanding is measuring AC), and the numbers vary from 9-14.

That's not enough to worry about.

You guys are thinking too much into this. Copperbands are a particularly lousy fish to put in quarantine. They really hate it. It stresses them out and they get sick. A copperband is not a very delicate fish but they get a bad rap because of this. They need hiding places and real food.

Paul, you're losing it.

 

[Paul B]

Paul, you're losing it.

I probably am. But never my copperband.

 

[brandon429]

landlocked vs access to constant ocean materials including all feed, water and substrate and food webs just steps away from the tank-two different types of reefing in my opinion

Being able to use all oceanic materials is one percent. Constant refreshment of marine pods and worms and food so that heterogeneity increases in a system vs the other way, which is landlocked reefing

Reefing in middle earth no ocean access is the rest of the 99%

Where are the threads showing how to skip quarantine using fish from Petco in Oklahoma + powerful feeding techniques?

From the data Im reading across forums, if you skip qt all your fish die. A further less than one percent have a forty year oceanic sourced tank to play up the conditions side

Puts middle landers type reefing in a bind
They should likely quarantine unless their tank is built from F1 ocean sources right?

Not that I wouldn't love to have your tank in my home but it's built in ways others cannot replicate or the non QT threads/how to's would be the going thing, not the quarantine threads. One percent vs ninety nine



If this fish isn't qt strong, then only ocean sourced tanks should use them that don't require qt. It's not that qt should be skipped, it's that we should qt and choose fish known to tolerate it. If I'm horribly off base let me know there are lots of nano reefers who want the newest and best information regarding less fish loss than our previous twenty years.

If feeding only certain feeds or aging a tank in a certain way matters, people want to know

 

[Paul B]

It's not the ocean that keeps my fish immune, it's the live bacteria they eat at every meal and that includes live white worms. (I collected no sea water this year) I got my whiteworm culture online. The whiteworms live in soil and I add some of the soil along with the worms for the bacteria. I also use clams and if I can get them earthworms. I also feed every day live blackworms which are also available online.

If you look through the disease threads you will see the multitudes of fish that either die or get sick in quarantine or afterwards. Quarantine, especially for long periods will destroy a fishes immune system as will feeding foods with no live bacteria in it. Placing a fish in a bare tank with PVC fittings will not destroy it's immunity but it will extremely stress any fish especially a fish such as a copperband or a tang. Clownfish and all damsels will fare better. Many aquarists who have been at this for many years or decades figured out how to keep their fish immune so they never lose a fish to disease as I don't.
Fish come to us already immune and IMO quarantining destroys that which is the reason for all the disease threads.
After the fish is quarantined you can not feed it something natural that has living bacteria and parasites in it as fish eat in the sea every day.
Fish in a tank should "never" get sick and most fish should constantly spawn and live out their natural lifespan which for most fish is 15 or 20 years.
If you have a fish that can spawn in a tank, and it is not spawning, it is not healthy at all as it is un natural for a fish not to spawn as healthy fish produce eggs constantly.
Quarantining is one way to go, but that is not natural. How many people have fish (not damsels which will spawn in a bag) that were quarantined for a long period and it is spawning?
Mandarins, pipefish, gobies, bleenies, clowns, cardinals and many others should constantly spawn as that is their measure of health. A Natural diet rich in living bacteria forces fish to lay eggs and stay immune.
Just my opinion of course

 

[Paul B]

If feeding only certain feeds or aging a tank in a certain way matters, people want to know

People do want to know which is why I have been posting about it for decades and even wrote a book.
It is easy to have immune fish but it is very hard to have immune fish after they have been quarantined. A natural tank needs to be started at the beginning and fish need to eat live bacteria almost every meal from the start. No pellets, flakes or freeze dried.
A fish in the sea eats live fish at every meal and that fish has it's guts loaded with bacteria and parasites. Fish need this constantly to stay immune.
Live whiteworms are very cheap to culture. I think I bought my culture on line years ago for $10.00 and it is still going. You don't need to feed a lot of worms, just a worm or two for each fish every day. Clams, if you can get them is excellent but of course not canned. Most people can get earthworms, chop them up to feed, the soil in them is loaded with bacteria. Squid, fish, and shrimp are not a good food but clams, snails or oysters are.
I add some soil with the worms as it is natural and has bacteria. We need to think of bacteria and parasites as friends not enemies. Without bacteria in our guts we would not live a few weeks as they digest our food for us.
One reason we can't yet go on long space voyages is due to a lack of fresh bacteria because without fresh bacteria, we will also have a compromised immune system.
Fish are different from us, they also need parasites in their food if they "want" to stay immune from them. Fish spend a lot of calories making the slime that is much of their immune system and to have anti parasite properties in their slime, they need parasites.

 

[brandon429]

What I like is that a biological component keeps Paul's losses so low

To me there's still work to be done to get similar results in the more common approaches lacking such diversity. In time I'm sure any biological arrangement that works will stand out, at least you have a successful model of healthy fish to work from for sure. It takes push and pull to evolve procedure these are the early days of change in how we approach fish care in one way or another

I think there are statistically significant documentations though regarding qt in nano reef care

Those tended to be the least heterogenous setups and lethality was much higher back in the day. The good qt ERs at nano reef.com are showing marked success, they're using hardier species too

 

[Orcus Varuna]

People do want to know which is why I have been posting about it for decades and even wrote a book.
It is easy to have immune fish but it is very hard to have immune fish after they have been quarantined. A natural tank needs to be started at the beginning and fish need to eat live bacteria almost every meal from the start. No pellets, flakes or freeze dried.
A fish in the sea eats live fish at every meal and that fish has it's guts loaded with bacteria and parasites. Fish need this constantly to stay immune.
Live whiteworms are very cheap to culture. I think I bought my culture on line years ago for $10.00 and it is still going. You don't need to feed a lot of worms, just a worm or two for each fish every day. Clams, if you can get them is excellent but of course not canned. Most people can get earthworms, chop them up to feed, the soil in them is loaded with bacteria. Squid, fish, and shrimp are not a good food but clams, snails or oysters are.
I add some soil with the worms as it is natural and has bacteria. We need to think of bacteria and parasites as friends not enemies. Without bacteria in our guts we would not live a few weeks as they digest our food for us.
One reason we can't yet go on long space voyages is due to a lack of fresh bacteria because without fresh bacteria, we will also have a compromised immune system.
Fish are different from us, they also need parasites in their food if they "want" to stay immune from them. Fish spend a lot of calories making the slime that is much of their immune system and to have anti parasite properties in their slime, they need parasites.

I really do think you are on to something here. As a medical professional some of our worst afflictions are a direct result of poor flora diversity. MRSA, Clostridium Difficile, ESBL, etc. They are all present on and within us every waking minute of our lives but are harmless under most circumstances until our immune system is compromised and intestinal flora decimated from disease and subsequent antibiotic use. Once they take hold they are nearly impossible to get back under control and can kill with ruthless efficiency.

As an aside, my brother is currently doing some very promising research on combating these pathogens with fecal transplants from a healthy person. The results are far from final but the initial results are promising to say the least. Finally, to further your point, even though we are so different, fish and humans have many diseases that can cross over such as tuberculosis and vibrio, so why wouldn’t prophylaxis through exposure as you suggest work in fish as well...

 

[Paul B]

It takes push and pull to evolve procedure these are the early days of change in how we approach fish care in one way or another

These are not really early days. The saltwater hobby started in the US in 1971. That's when I started my tank and although there have been many advances, the disease aspect has gone backwards. As I keep saying, there is no reason fish should ever get sick, mine never do and I am not that smart and I probably spend much less time and money on my tank than anyone here. I don't even have test kits. All my paired fish are spawning and they almost always, but not quite, die of old age. Sometimes they jump out or I buy a fish to experiment which I am trying a new feeding routine that doesn't work so they starve. But 90% of my fish die of old age and none of my fish have even been sick even the 26 year old fireclowns.

Orcus Varuna is correct. We and fish need an influx of bacteria every day and IMO quarantining or not feeding live bacteria and parasites severely shortens a fishes lifespan. I didn't make this up, just read these threads.

I started a discussion on immunity here because this thread is not exactly for it.
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/a-discussion-on-immunity.209701/

 

[brandon429]

The early days of non haphazard fish addition... was trying to position that take as the early days in the hobby where quarantiners have made real strides stopping loss in tanks not built entirely from ocean materials

Start of hobby/ low to none quarantine up to middle 2000s = constant disease loss

Current times where qt is becoming as standard as cycling a tank= significant drop in disease loss

We can see tons of threads where ich was stopped by qt

We do not see tons of threads where landlocked people skip qt in a newer tank and get by disease free regardless of feed quality

We do see threads where forty year and thirty year ocean refreshed tanks get by without qt.

 

[Paul B]

Disease is a non issue for me but in the beginning it was. I had no salt water medications so I got them from human diseases. Here are some from my Log book.
It took me maybe 10 years until I discovered that live foods prevent disease but I thought it was the food itself. I realized later it was not the food, but the bacteria in the food. I can throw any fish with any disease in my tank and nothing would happen. That fish may die, but nothing else. It is so simple because fish have a great immune system if we just let them use it.
Quarantined fish which have no immune, system eating foods with dead bacteria are not complete fish and must live in a "bubble" and would "probably" have a much shorter life span. (but I am speculating) As I said, most fish we keep live 15 or 20 years with clowns getting into their thirties. I doubt there are many very old quarantined fish on here but since I don't know all the fish on here ,i could be wrong. Humble may know better. (he loves it when I get involved in these threads)

The people with the losses just try to buy fish and put them in their tank with no quarantining, but there is more to it than that. Probably most Noobs feed flakes and pellets, that won't work and the fish will die. Fish are not like us and need proper foods, not sterile foods. Most of us feed commercially prepared frozen foods and thats great. I use them also. But most of those foods are sterile. Many of them are irradiated to kill bacteria and other pathogens. Those foods also won't do. There are no commercial foods that have the proper bacteria "and" parasites. Some foods such as LRS (which I use) has pro-biotics and thats great. But Pro Biotics are only good bacteria. Good bacteria will help fish digest foods but will do nothing for their immune system. Their immune system, like ours, needs to encounter diseases to become immune to them.
To get that bacteria, we need to feed fresh or home frozen foods. Of course, live foods are the best and if I could not get live foods, I would get out of the hobby.
Our home freezer won't kill all the bacteria but commercially frozen foods are processed colder and stored before being packaged so their live bacteria is almost non existent. They need to be sterile to keep them and sell them.
Live clams which are frozen in our freezer are best and easy, but I realize many people can't get them. I can't help that but that is the way it is. Fish don't really care if we live in Wyoming. They still need proper foods and earthworms and white worms also work.
You should not feed these foods to quarantined fish for the reasons I stated.

 

[Antics]

As a counterpoint to Paul's advice I want to point out that some of you are really reaching for an explanation for why Paul's method is superior to a quarantine protocol.

Instead of comparing Ich, Velvet, or Flukes to MRSA. Instead consider it as the parasite it is. Paul's advice for fighting off these parasites is a form of mental gymnastics in my opinion. While I agree with immunity in fish being an interesting topic worth research, I would attribute this importance more so to bacterial infections that are the result of injuries (like MRSA in humans).

Do not use live food / worms as a substitute for combating Ich, Velvet, or Flukes... these are parasites that a fish can (somewhat) easily be rid of. You wouldn't listen to a stranger telling you to routinely eat raw pork to develop an immunity to tape worms and other parasites occasionally found therein. Why? You'd just take the extra precaution to remove the parasite. Similarly, you wouldn't tell someone with lice (either the head or pants seam ) to eat more broccoli with some fresh soil on the stem.

Quarantine is also about conditioning newly acquired fish to a communal system with species of fish they do not usually interact with in a much more confined space. These are secondary benefits that can not be understated.

Paul's tank is very old and he has had great success with his fish and his feeding/conditioning protocols. But live worms is not the silver bullet to solve all our problems.

 

[Orcus Varuna]

As a counterpoint to Paul's advice I want to point out that some of you are really reaching for an explanation for why Paul's method is superior to a quarantine protocol.

Instead of comparing Ich, Velvet, or Flukes to MRSA. Instead consider it as the parasite it is. Paul's advice for fighting off these parasites is a form of mental gymnastics in my opinion. While I agree with immunity in fish being an interesting topic worth research, I would attribute this importance more so to bacterial infections that are the result of injuries (like MRSA in humans).

Do not use live food / worms as a substitute for combating Ich, Velvet, or Flukes... these are parasites that a fish can (somewhat) easily be rid of. You wouldn't listen to a stranger telling you to routinely eat raw pork to develop an immunity to tape worms and other parasites occasionally found therein. Why? You'd just take the extra precaution to remove the parasite. Similarly, you wouldn't tell someone with lice (either the head or pants seam ) to eat more broccoli with some fresh soil on the stem.

Quarantine is also about conditioning newly acquired fish to a communal system with species of fish they do not usually interact with in a much more confined space. These are secondary benefits that can not be understated.

Paul's tank is very old and he has had great success with his fish and his feeding/conditioning protocols. But live worms is not the silver bullet to solve all our problems.

I wasn’t comparing MRSA directly to inch I was just pointing out his premise has a solid base. Will I stop and quarantining, feed earth worms and toss disease riddled fish in my system? Heck no lol.

 

[dealseer]

@Humblefish do you use grounding rods in your tanks?

 

[Paul B]

But live worms is not the silver bullet to solve all our problems.

It has been in mine for 40 years

I have no stock in anyone's tank, just mine. I have been doing this a while and I thought I would share what I learned. Of course no one has to listen to this. Just read the disease threads and do what you feel is the best way.

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
(ISRN ImmunologyVolume 2012 (2012), Article ID 853470, 29 pageshttp://dx.doi.org/10.5402/2012/853470Review ArticleAn Overview of the Immunological Defenses in Fish SkinMaría Ángeles Esteban)
Quote: Immunity associated with the parasites depends on the inhabiting discrete sites in the host. Especially important for this paper are the ectoparasites, those habiting in or on the skin. Until recently there had been little direct evidence of innate immune mechanisms against parasites associated with mucosal epithelium [285]. The active immunological role of skin against parasitic infection has been shown recently [286–288], and now mucosal immunity against them start to be elucidated.

 

[brandon429]

I do believe your system would present exceptional biological diversity well above norm to be able to take the diseases into the system and outcompete them. Probiotic palette yes

Something has to account for your fish health and breeding agreed. Bulk review of online cycled tank threads show numbers that skew towards people losing less fish using qt, when buying from lfs and mail

I think most people approach marine fish care with the same addition approach we all had with guppies and swords and platties and they already know to acclimate carefully. Qt is total new action for most keepers to read about. They're simply not going to wait for tank aging, they're willing to wait until ammonia compliance is measured and that's it. I wonder what set of works other than qt will meet that demand


Agreed qt seems harsh compared to the valid claim of instantly get them into ideal feed and environmental conditions. Working with only the materials avg reefers gets I strongly think changes outcome when for example thirty new nano reefs are tracked over a year's time


Would make a good article

 

[Humblefish]

@Humblefish do you use grounding rods in your tanks?

Yes and all equipment gets plugged into a GFCI.