Kole Tang sudden illness and death. ID help appreciated!

JasonCG

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Help! My beautiful yellow-eyed Kole tang was doing fine yesterday, behaving normally, eating beautifully, and then today it was lying flat on the bottom of the tank looking like this. It was gasping for breath, clearly in distress. In the time it took for me to move it out of the tank to a quarantine tank he died. All of the other fish in my tank are behaving normally, looking fine. I haven’t added any fish to the tank in months, though I did add a few snails a few days ago. I’m fighting a moderate cyano outbreak right now, as you can probably see in the picture, but other than that my water seems OK. I’ll post my parameters below. Any help with ID would be much appreciated, as well as recommendations for treatment to prevent whatever it is - I’m guessing velvet? - from spreading to the rest of my tank. Thank you!

temp - 78.4
ph - 8
salinity - 34.7
alk - 9.45
calc - 439
mg - 1300
ammonia/nitrite/nitrate/phos - 0
 

threebuoys

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I'm sure Jay will get back to you soon. This definitely looks and sounds like velvet to me, but he is the expert. You will likely need to treat with copper safe or copper Power or Cupramine if you can get one. And, a QT tank will be needed. Velvet works very fast as you have seen.
 

Jay Hemdal

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Help! My beautiful yellow-eyed Kole tang was doing fine yesterday, behaving normally, eating beautifully, and then today it was lying flat on the bottom of the tank looking like this. It was gasping for breath, clearly in distress. In the time it took for me to move it out of the tank to a quarantine tank he died. All of the other fish in my tank are behaving normally, looking fine. I haven’t added any fish to the tank in months, though I did add a few snails a few days ago. I’m fighting a moderate cyano outbreak right now, as you can probably see in the picture, but other than that my water seems OK. I’ll post my parameters below. Any help with ID would be much appreciated, as well as recommendations for treatment to prevent whatever it is - I’m guessing velvet? - from spreading to the rest of my tank. Thank you!

temp - 78.4
ph - 8
salinity - 34.7
alk - 9.45
calc - 439
mg - 1300
ammonia/nitrite/nitrate/phos - 0
While common wisdom is that fish seen breathing rapidly and then dying within a day is usually Amyloodinium/velvet. However, the spots on this fish don’t line up with that, nor does the other fish being symptom free. It is rare for one fish in a tank to die from velvet and not have the other fish also be sick.
Watch the respiration rate on the remaining fish very closely. You’ll need a treatment tank to move them to if they develop velvet.
Jay
 
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JasonCG

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Thanks everybody. It’s been a rough day. :-( I’m going to watch the remaining fish like a hawk for any spots or signs of distress, and if they so much as sneeze then they’re all going into the QT tank with some copper. Thanks for the feedback and advice.
 

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Thanks everybody. It’s been a rough day. :-( I’m going to watch the remaining fish like a hawk for any spots or signs of distress, and if they so much as sneeze then they’re all going into the QT tank with some copper. Thanks for the feedback and advice.
Exposed to a fish with velvet warrants both adding hawk and any others to quarantine and letting display tank go Fallow for 60 days.
 
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JasonCG

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I thought I’d give an update to everyone who helped me, and maybe see if you have any thoughts about what happened and where I should go next. It’s been a rough week. Out of my Kole tang, two clowns, Valentini puffer, firefish, and coral beauty, only my coral beauty has survived. I found one of my clowns dead the day after my initial post, and the puffer had started scraping on the rocks, so in the QT they all went. Everyone but the firefish and the coral beauty, that is, because they hid in the rocks and I couldn’t get to them. The puffer and the remaining clown got a 5 minute fresh water dip, followed by a 90 minute bath in reef rally, and then went into the QT with cupramine. Despite running a fish ICU for the past week, the clown died shortly after going into QT, and though I thought the puffer would make it, it started huffing and puffing yesterday, and today he was gone. The firefish died in the DT a few days ago, after I’d seen it swimming around with a dusting of white spots. I’ve been dosing the DT with polyp lab medic from day one. I’d ordered a trap to try to get the coral beauty into the QT and let the tank go fallow, and it just arrived yesterday. My question for anyone who is following, and who read through this wordy post, is what the heck happened? I’m sure it probably was velvet, but why do you think the FW and reef rally dips and copper didn’t work? Why do you think the coral beauty is doing fine? My most recent fish addition was the coral beauty, which was quarantined for a month before going in the tank. Aside from some snails that I ordered from algae barn that went in a few days prior to this, I can’t imagine what the source could be. Could snails carry velvet into the tank? Obviously, I still want to let the tank go fallow before I try to rebuild, any tips on getting this coral beauty out without tearing down my fairly large scape? And as far as my QT goes, it’s only 10 gallons. Do you think that’s sufficient, or could it be too small, and the stress might have contributed to the fishes’ demise? It’s a lot, I know, but I’m trying to learn from this disaster.
 

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While common wisdom is that fish seen breathing rapidly and then dying within a day is usually Amyloodinium/velvet. However, the spots on this fish don’t line up with that, nor does the other fish being symptom free. It is rare for one fish in a tank to die from velvet and not have the other fish also be sick.
Watch the respiration rate on the remaining fish very closely. You’ll need a treatment tank to move them to if they develop velvet.
Jay
I just wanted to chime in, my yellow tang has white little things around his body but not on it if that makes sense, just the outer portion of his whole body. He had ich and I treated him with cupramine so I thought everything was ok. Then ich went away and now he was developing what I thought is lymph, but still not too sure. I added another filter to my quarantine to ensure the highest water clarity and he’s doing much better. Only difference is my yellow tang never had the spots on his body like your kole tang. I hope someone chimes in and figures out exactly what it was! Sorry for all your losses.
 

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threebuoys

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Man I really feel for you.

I'm sure you'll get some questions from the others. A couple that pop into my mind,

What was the copper concentration you used? I believe you said cupramine was the product?
Did you have lots of aeration in the QT? 10 gallons is pretty small and could lead to ammonia spikes if not cycled or oxygen deprivation if not aerated.

If it was velvet, although Jay doubted that, you may have been too late getting them to the QT.

If it was Crypto, the copper concentration may have not been right.

Sorry again.
 

Jay Hemdal

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I thought I’d give an update to everyone who helped me, and maybe see if you have any thoughts about what happened and where I should go next. It’s been a rough week. Out of my Kole tang, two clowns, Valentini puffer, firefish, and coral beauty, only my coral beauty has survived. I found one of my clowns dead the day after my initial post, and the puffer had started scraping on the rocks, so in the QT they all went. Everyone but the firefish and the coral beauty, that is, because they hid in the rocks and I couldn’t get to them. The puffer and the remaining clown got a 5 minute fresh water dip, followed by a 90 minute bath in reef rally, and then went into the QT with cupramine. Despite running a fish ICU for the past week, the clown died shortly after going into QT, and though I thought the puffer would make it, it started huffing and puffing yesterday, and today he was gone. The firefish died in the DT a few days ago, after I’d seen it swimming around with a dusting of white spots. I’ve been dosing the DT with polyp lab medic from day one. I’d ordered a trap to try to get the coral beauty into the QT and let the tank go fallow, and it just arrived yesterday. My question for anyone who is following, and who read through this wordy post, is what the heck happened? I’m sure it probably was velvet, but why do you think the FW and reef rally dips and copper didn’t work? Why do you think the coral beauty is doing fine? My most recent fish addition was the coral beauty, which was quarantined for a month before going in the tank. Aside from some snails that I ordered from algae barn that went in a few days prior to this, I can’t imagine what the source could be. Could snails carry velvet into the tank? Obviously, I still want to let the tank go fallow before I try to rebuild, any tips on getting this coral beauty out without tearing down my fairly large scape? And as far as my QT goes, it’s only 10 gallons. Do you think that’s sufficient, or could it be too small, and the stress might have contributed to the fishes’ demise? It’s a lot, I know, but I’m trying to learn from this disaster.
Sorry to hear all this…

Ich and velvet are frequently confused, and later on in an infection can be very difficult to tell apart. Velvet tends to cause rapid breathing and not eating, while with ich, that doesn’t happen until late in the infection. Velvet kills within a few days, fish with ich can go a week or more.
I normally consider coral beauties to be prone to both diseases, so I can’t explain why yours lasted longer than all the other fish.
 
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JasonCG

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Man I really feel for you.

I'm sure you'll get some questions from the others. A couple that pop into my mind,

What was the copper concentration you used? I believe you said cupramine was the product?
Did you have lots of aeration in the QT? 10 gallons is pretty small and could lead to ammonia spikes if not cycled or oxygen deprivation if not aerated.

If it was velvet, although Jay doubted that, you may have been too late getting them to the QT.

If it was Crypto, the copper concentration may have not been right.

Sorry again.
Thanks for the feedback, and the sympathy. I dosed the cupramine to about 0.5ppm by the Hanna checker per the instructions, though I did give it 48 hours to ramp up. I wonder if I should have gone full strength right away. I think the tank was plenty aerated, I had a large air stone going full bore and a HOB filter. I think I was lulled into a false sense of security initially because it was just one fish that was sick, and the rest were looking fine. Regardless, I’d love to wrestle my last fish out of the DT so I can let the tank go fallow and kill off whatever this plague was!
 
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JasonCG

JasonCG

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Dose food grade Hydrogen peroxide NOW and attempt to remove and QT fish if you have the means to.
Thanks, I do have some food grade peroxide on my “just in case” shelf, so I may give it a try. I’m a little nervous about what it might do to some of my corals, I’ve heard that Duncan’s don’t like it too much. Or anemones. But I suppose it’s not too different from the polyp lab medic I’ve been using, and they’ve tolerated that alright. I’d much rather catch the darn thing and put it in the QT though!
 

Jay Hemdal

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Thanks, I do have some food grade peroxide on my “just in case” shelf, so I may give it a try. I’m a little nervous about what it might do to some of my corals, I’ve heard that Duncan’s don’t like it too much. Or anemones. But I suppose it’s not too different from the polyp lab medic I’ve been using, and they’ve tolerated that alright. I’d much rather catch the darn thing and put it in the QT though!

Too late for this case, but you can buy low range peroxide test strips on Amazon. Water Works/Sensafe.com is the company.

The trouble with peroxide is that the active amount in the water is dependent on the organic loading in the tank - dosing a bare quarantine tank and an algae-covered DT with the same amount of peroxide will result in vastly different free oxidant levels. This can also change over time with dosing - you add peroxide, and it reacts with organics, and naturally decomposes. You keep redosing the same amount, and everything is fine until the organics are used up - then free oxidants are left in the water and that harms the corals/anemones.

Jay
 
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