Juvi Desjardini Tang Post Mortem

[dtruitt]

Attempted to rescue this juvi desjardini Tang. He looked emaciated in the store, with a countable number of small white dots on his fins. Here is what he looked like yesterday.

After bringing him home, upon closer inspection he had a couple of nodules on his eyes. Per recommendations in another thread, he received a 5 minute FW dip, which appeared to knock some crud off of him. Photo of the material that sloughed off is attached below.

After his dip, he was reclusive for the rest of the day, but nibbled at some reef frenzy.

When I woke up today, he was deceased. Photos of him in a plastic bag are attached.

What is particularly interesting to me is the pale coloration near his gills.

I also put some fresh water in the bag with the corpse. You can see more white masses that broke loose after the addition of fresh water, and I got a close up of the white nodules on the tail. The white nodules on the tail easily brush off when I scrape down the tail with my fingernail (over the bag). I dont know if that detail is significant in any way.

I couldn't see more than a scant handful of spots on the body.

I suspect that an infection played a large role in the fish's demise.

What I'm wondering now is whether the experts here would chalk this up to Velvet, Flukes, and or Ich based on the photos provided.

Particularly interested to get @Humblefish thoughts.

 

[Big G]

Bacterial infection. The Fin Rot evident in the pic and the debris you noticed falling off after the dip. Bacterial infections are usually a secondary actor. The primary may be flukes, but also looks more like ich and maybe velvet as it can cause the color to fade as the fish is deprived of O2.
Good on you for trying to save the fish.

 

[fishguy242]

sorry to see,kudo's on rescue attempt love the rss

 

[dtruitt]

Bacterial infection. The Fin Rot evident in the pic and the debris you noticed falling off after the dip. Bacterial infections are usually a secondary actor. The primary may be flukes, but also looks more like ich and maybe velvet as it can cause the color to fade as the fish is deprived of O2.
Good on you for trying to save the fish.

If you had to make a call, ich or velvet, which would you suggest in this case?

I'm going to the fish store tomorrow to present the cadaver, QT water sample, and research to a) get my money back and b) hopefully key them in to an issue lurking in their tanks.

Thoughts from people more knowledgable than myself will help recoup that expense (which I wouldn't push if they cut me some slack on the price of the fish when I pointed out that it wasn't doing well) and hopefully inform some corrective action to prevent avoidable fish death.

I'm probably being a little naive in expecting that a diagnosis will save any livestock though

 

[Big G]

The only way to be sure is to do a few scrapes from the fish: gills, skin, etc. and then take a look under a scope to iD the parasites. And then do a gram stain test to check for gram negative/positive bacterial infection.