Hippo Tang with Hole In The Head - Ideas?

[bdare]

Hello all,

Looking for some advice to see if I can get rid of the holes in the face of my hippo tang. My understanding is this is typically caused by a few issues including stray current, poor water quality, cheap carbon or diet.

I do run a grounding probe. It's in my sump in the return section.

Here are my water parameters:
Ca - 430 (Salifert)
Alk - 9.2 (HANA)
Mg - 1390 (Salifert)
PO4 - .05ppm (HANA ULR)
Nitrate - 5 (Salifert)

I feed a sheet of nori daily and rotate between purple and green. I also feed freeze dried mysis soaked in selcon, LRS Herbivore frenzy, frozen mysis, Piscine pellets, and NLS probiotix pellets.

I have not run any carbon for the last 8 months trying to see if it would make a difference. Whether directly related or not, I did notice a bit of blue color come back in the holes, but then the progress stopped. When I do run carbon I've only ever used ROX and rinse it until there is no visible dust or color from the runoff water.

Any ideas?

 

[KingTideCorals]

Not entirely sure what is happening, but I am going to call upon the expert in this area on R2R!

@Jay Hemdal what you seeing here?

 

[Jay Hemdal]

That does look like pretty classic HLLE. Stray voltage doesn’t cause this. Dietary issues haven’t been proven in studies to cause this, but I can’t rule that out. Your fish’s diet is fine though. Past carbon use has been implicated as a main cause, and removing the carbon doesn’t always cure it. Sometimes the scars are permanent, and I think that is the case here.
Jay

 

[bdare]

That does look like pretty classic HLLE. Stray voltage doesn’t cause this. Dietary issues haven’t been proven in studies to cause this, but I can’t rule that out. Your fish’s diet is fine though. Past carbon use has been implicated as a main cause, and removing the carbon doesn’t always cure it. Sometimes the scars are permanent, and I think that is the case here.
Jay

Thanks Jay. Is there any correlation in the type of carbon used? I always thought I was safe using well rinsed ROX carbon.

 

[GeoSquid]

Try feeding live clams and white worms. Look up PaulB's philosophy. No dry foods only fresh seafood and clams. I have a hippo that got ick and I also fed a lot of live macro algae (caulerpa) with clams it got better in a week as well as the other fish in the tank.

 

[Jay Hemdal]

Thanks Jay. Is there any correlation in the type of carbon used? I always thought I was safe using well rinsed ROX carbon.

Well Rinsed carbon, especially ROX is pretty safe, but I've had pelleted carbon cause it, especially if it is tumbled in a reactor. Sometimes, there is no carbon connection, but there very often is. More commonly carbon is used, but no HLLE results - we see that in tanks with very good skimming, and lots of invertebrate life.

Here is a funny story - a professor in Florida set her students up to test diet as a causative factor. Sure enough, the fish with the poor diet got terrible HLLE. She was writing up the study and then discovered that one of her students added carbon to that tank "because the water looked cloudy" (grin)

Jay