Short version:
I'm having some type of major disease outbreak in my reef tank. All of the common solutions are not working and fish are slowly dying. I think this is a complicated multi-part issue in which there isn't one problem, but several compounding problems. I'm hoping someone can help.
Long Version (with all the details):
I have a reef tank that is about 10 months old. I had finally got it to the point where parameters were stable, nutrient levels were low, corals were thriving and I was happy with the reef.
The tank is 135 gallon cube with a total system volume of 210 gallons. It is a mixed Reef with some chromies anthias clownfish tangs and a cleanup crew.
I had minimal fish deaths over the last 10 months. Only about two or three fish which could be for any reason and I wasn't concerned. I have always quarantined every single new fish before placing them into the display tank.
However, it has come to my attention after reading articles about quarantining, that just quarantining fish wasn't enough. I really should have been quarantining every single coral, clean up crew member, or pretty much anything that has a droplet of water on it. For that matter, I also should have been wearing a hazmat suit and making sure that my quarantine tank was in a separate room from my sump or fish tank to avoid aerosolization. I should have bought separate fishnets, supplies, buckets and every other tool and kept them separate from the quarantine tank and the display tank. But obviously there's a limit and introducing a disease to my tank was inevitable.
To the best of my memory I believe the problem started slightly after buying a new cleaner shrimp and a flower anenome from my LFS. Slightly after that I noticed one of my white clownfish had what appeared to be lockjaw. He seemed kind of ragged and his mouth is stuck open. I looked in the forums and the best advice I could find was that he probably got stung by something and he would be fine in a few days. He died within a week or two.
From then other fish have all come down with several symptoms. Some have survived and gotten better and others have died. The symptoms include (and/or): white spots, white cotton-like substance on there skin, lethargy, swimming at the top, resting near the bottom, not eating, perishing.
I have tried multiple things to remedy the situation. I'm not sure if I'm making progress or not. Here's what I've done.
Two fish I removed from the tank and put in a quarantine tank. The quarantine tank was made with tank water from the main tank. I was trying to minimalize the amount of stress on the fish moving him from one tank to another. The goal was to treat the water in the quarantine tank with medicine to rid the tank of disease. However the fish died within hours if not minutes from being transferred to the quarantine tank.
After that other fish would get sick so I realized removing them one at a time to quarantine tank would not work anyway. Catching these fish is also extremely difficult as the fishnet will probably destroy every single coral in my attempt to get these fast little fish. Obviously removing every rock and and coral from the tank just to catch the fish puts the corals at risk as well. So it is quite the catch-22. So I looked into treatment options for the compete reef tank.
In the beginning white spots had not appeared yet it as it was mostly white fluffiness on their skin, lethargy and swimming at the bottom. I took my best guess based on what I read and tried prazipro. I found the instructions and ran a course of that, but the disease remained. And then it got worse and then I saw signs of the white spots as well. Based on this I am thinking that if the fish do have ick, it's a secondary infection due to the stress from something more major and underlying. But again that's just a guess.
So I tried a second type of treatment. Which is what I'm currently doing. It's a two-part treatment. First I'm following instructions and dosing polyplabs Reef medic as instructed. However, I'm already on my 18th day of treatment. The second treatment is mixing seachem Focus, Kanaplex and Metroplex with some Reef Frenzy and feeding it to the fish.
This treatment has had some benefit as some fish have got better, and show no signs of illness. Other fish have never got sick. Some fish have looked sick the entire time but have not died. And of course other fish have died. It should also be noted that two fish jumped out of the tank and committed suicide. One even busted through my buy-your-own and do-it-yourself custom tank covers for my rimless rank.
There are some other weird things happening in my tank and I don't know how they're all related. These problems all started after I began treating the fish and after they had got sick:
*My alkalinity started to rise so I reduced my alkalinity dosing to stabilize it. I'm currently using half as much alkalinity solution in my two-part dosing as I used to.
*My calcium usage remained the same at first but seems to be slowly declining now.
*My nitrates and phosphates have skyrocketed. I was holding them stable with nitrates at around 1 and phosphates at .01 using nopox. However they skyrocketed to about phosphates of .09 and nitrates of 5. I did some quick water changes and have got them to come down a little bit. The nutrients spike correlates timing wise with this weird white stringy stuff that's floating around the tank and getting stuck on corals and rock. It looks like someone's snot-rocketed into my tank and continually does it. I also caught my long spined Black Sea Urchin spewing out white cloudy goo into the water. I don't know if the two white substances are the same. From what I read the urchin is trying to mate.
*Finally as far as corals go, it looks like one small frag I've had for 8 months died very quickly and and NPS Coral(gorgonia) looks a little ragged and one organ pipe coral looks a little ticked off or could be dead. But other than that all the other corals are doing great and still seem to be thriving even with me medicating the tank.
I don't know what to make of all this or what to do. Any help and advise would be great. Thanks for reading all of this.
I'm having some type of major disease outbreak in my reef tank. All of the common solutions are not working and fish are slowly dying. I think this is a complicated multi-part issue in which there isn't one problem, but several compounding problems. I'm hoping someone can help.
Long Version (with all the details):
I have a reef tank that is about 10 months old. I had finally got it to the point where parameters were stable, nutrient levels were low, corals were thriving and I was happy with the reef.
The tank is 135 gallon cube with a total system volume of 210 gallons. It is a mixed Reef with some chromies anthias clownfish tangs and a cleanup crew.
I had minimal fish deaths over the last 10 months. Only about two or three fish which could be for any reason and I wasn't concerned. I have always quarantined every single new fish before placing them into the display tank.
However, it has come to my attention after reading articles about quarantining, that just quarantining fish wasn't enough. I really should have been quarantining every single coral, clean up crew member, or pretty much anything that has a droplet of water on it. For that matter, I also should have been wearing a hazmat suit and making sure that my quarantine tank was in a separate room from my sump or fish tank to avoid aerosolization. I should have bought separate fishnets, supplies, buckets and every other tool and kept them separate from the quarantine tank and the display tank. But obviously there's a limit and introducing a disease to my tank was inevitable.
To the best of my memory I believe the problem started slightly after buying a new cleaner shrimp and a flower anenome from my LFS. Slightly after that I noticed one of my white clownfish had what appeared to be lockjaw. He seemed kind of ragged and his mouth is stuck open. I looked in the forums and the best advice I could find was that he probably got stung by something and he would be fine in a few days. He died within a week or two.
From then other fish have all come down with several symptoms. Some have survived and gotten better and others have died. The symptoms include (and/or): white spots, white cotton-like substance on there skin, lethargy, swimming at the top, resting near the bottom, not eating, perishing.
I have tried multiple things to remedy the situation. I'm not sure if I'm making progress or not. Here's what I've done.
Two fish I removed from the tank and put in a quarantine tank. The quarantine tank was made with tank water from the main tank. I was trying to minimalize the amount of stress on the fish moving him from one tank to another. The goal was to treat the water in the quarantine tank with medicine to rid the tank of disease. However the fish died within hours if not minutes from being transferred to the quarantine tank.
After that other fish would get sick so I realized removing them one at a time to quarantine tank would not work anyway. Catching these fish is also extremely difficult as the fishnet will probably destroy every single coral in my attempt to get these fast little fish. Obviously removing every rock and and coral from the tank just to catch the fish puts the corals at risk as well. So it is quite the catch-22. So I looked into treatment options for the compete reef tank.
In the beginning white spots had not appeared yet it as it was mostly white fluffiness on their skin, lethargy and swimming at the bottom. I took my best guess based on what I read and tried prazipro. I found the instructions and ran a course of that, but the disease remained. And then it got worse and then I saw signs of the white spots as well. Based on this I am thinking that if the fish do have ick, it's a secondary infection due to the stress from something more major and underlying. But again that's just a guess.
So I tried a second type of treatment. Which is what I'm currently doing. It's a two-part treatment. First I'm following instructions and dosing polyplabs Reef medic as instructed. However, I'm already on my 18th day of treatment. The second treatment is mixing seachem Focus, Kanaplex and Metroplex with some Reef Frenzy and feeding it to the fish.
This treatment has had some benefit as some fish have got better, and show no signs of illness. Other fish have never got sick. Some fish have looked sick the entire time but have not died. And of course other fish have died. It should also be noted that two fish jumped out of the tank and committed suicide. One even busted through my buy-your-own and do-it-yourself custom tank covers for my rimless rank.
There are some other weird things happening in my tank and I don't know how they're all related. These problems all started after I began treating the fish and after they had got sick:
*My alkalinity started to rise so I reduced my alkalinity dosing to stabilize it. I'm currently using half as much alkalinity solution in my two-part dosing as I used to.
*My calcium usage remained the same at first but seems to be slowly declining now.
*My nitrates and phosphates have skyrocketed. I was holding them stable with nitrates at around 1 and phosphates at .01 using nopox. However they skyrocketed to about phosphates of .09 and nitrates of 5. I did some quick water changes and have got them to come down a little bit. The nutrients spike correlates timing wise with this weird white stringy stuff that's floating around the tank and getting stuck on corals and rock. It looks like someone's snot-rocketed into my tank and continually does it. I also caught my long spined Black Sea Urchin spewing out white cloudy goo into the water. I don't know if the two white substances are the same. From what I read the urchin is trying to mate.
*Finally as far as corals go, it looks like one small frag I've had for 8 months died very quickly and and NPS Coral(gorgonia) looks a little ragged and one organ pipe coral looks a little ticked off or could be dead. But other than that all the other corals are doing great and still seem to be thriving even with me medicating the tank.
I don't know what to make of all this or what to do. Any help and advise would be great. Thanks for reading all of this.
