New to R2R - Quarantine question

[W31Olds]

Hello everyone, Sorta new to the R2R community. I setup my 180 Tank about 8 months ago after being out of the hobby for approx. 30 years. I can honestly say that the R2R forums/ tips have been extremely informative to help with my tank setup/diagnosis of problems. I have 6 fish and only one coral so far all doing well. My question for the community/ fish medics is about quarantine. I lost 2 fish after about 4 weeks in quarantine. A Juv. Emp Angel and Purple Tang. The angel came in with very mild ich that was treated with copperpower successfully. At about the 3.5 week mark the Angel started to decline refusing food and swimming in the airstone and the Tang was scratching so I changed the water and treated for Flukes with Prazi. The next day the water was extremely cloudy for the next few days until clearing up with no change in the behavior of both fish so I decided to do a 5 min dip to provide some temporary relief. Sometime after during the night the Tang died and the Angel still declined and died yesterday. My questions to the experts is if I see a bacterial bloom does that mean the Prazi was rendered ineffective? Also, I did not expect the Tang (about 2") to perish from the dip as it was eating well and fat so is a dip often too hard on juvenile fish.

 

[vetteguy53081]

Hello everyone, Sorta new to the R2R community. I setup my 180 Tank about 8 months ago after being out of the hobby for approx. 30 years. I can honestly say that the R2R forums/ tips have been extremely informative to help with my tank setup/diagnosis of problems. I have 6 fish and only one coral so far all doing well. My question for the community/ fish medics is about quarantine. I lost 2 fish after about 4 weeks in quarantine. A Juv. Emp Angel and Purple Tang. The angel came in with very mild ich that was treated with copperpower successfully. At about the 3.5 week mark the Angel started to decline refusing food and swimming in the airstone and the Tang was scratching so I changed the water and treated for Flukes with Prazi. The next day the water was extremely cloudy for the next few days until clearing up with no change in the behavior of both fish so I decided to do a 5 min dip to provide some temporary relief. Sometime after during the night the Tang died and the Angel still declined and died yesterday. My questions to the experts is if I see a bacterial bloom does that mean the Prazi was rendered ineffective? Also, I did not expect the Tang (about 2") to perish from the dip as it was eating well and fat so is a dip often too hard on juvenile fish.

How much Prazi did you use and how did you apply it , over what length of time?
Please post pics of this bloom you mention.
Any heavy breathing prior to loss and what was ammonia level?
The scratching may have been flukes or velvet

 

[W31Olds]

I changed 80% of the water before applying the Prazi calculating the volume of water of the 40 gallon breeder tank I'm using for quarantine using internal Lx W x water level depth and I only had 3 pieces of PVC pipe whose volume was probably offset by my approx 1 gallon cannister filter. The bloom must have started overnight and visibility was approx 12 ". The water was clear again after 3 days the fish did not seem any better. Both breathing hard with no improvement in the angel. The tang was swimming around but still scratching and noticing some clamped fins. Pretty sure it was not velvet as the Tangs appearance was perfect so definitely Flukes. The ammonia level was high when I measured it so I moved both fish to another tank after a freshwater dip and the Tang passed overnight. Unfortunately, I don't have any pics during the bloom. I'm beginning to wonder if the ammonia put undue stress on the fish.

 

[Jay Hemdal Verified Community Expert]

Hello everyone, Sorta new to the R2R community. I setup my 180 Tank about 8 months ago after being out of the hobby for approx. 30 years. I can honestly say that the R2R forums/ tips have been extremely informative to help with my tank setup/diagnosis of problems. I have 6 fish and only one coral so far all doing well. My question for the community/ fish medics is about quarantine. I lost 2 fish after about 4 weeks in quarantine. A Juv. Emp Angel and Purple Tang. The angel came in with very mild ich that was treated with copperpower successfully. At about the 3.5 week mark the Angel started to decline refusing food and swimming in the airstone and the Tang was scratching so I changed the water and treated for Flukes with Prazi. The next day the water was extremely cloudy for the next few days until clearing up with no change in the behavior of both fish so I decided to do a 5 min dip to provide some temporary relief. Sometime after during the night the Tang died and the Angel still declined and died yesterday. My questions to the experts is if I see a bacterial bloom does that mean the Prazi was rendered ineffective? Also, I did not expect the Tang (about 2") to perish from the dip as it was eating well and fat so is a dip often too hard on juvenile fish.

Tough to say exactly what was going on. I presume you were using Prazipro? The cloudiness after treating with prazipro is due to the solvent used (a type of glycol). That gets consumed by bacteria (so does the prazi itself) and that in turn can cause a bacterial bloom. In turn, the bacteria can strip oxygen from the water. You need to add good aeration (not just circulation) when treating with that.

Another issue that can crop up is with fish that have heavy fluke infections - the prazi knocks all of the thousands of flukes off the fish, but then, there are thousands of holes in the fish's skin and the fish bleeds out. If it survives that, there is still a chance the holes will be invaded with bacteria and become infected.

Both emperor angels and purple tangs are very prone to egg laying flukes. Prazi doesn't kill fluke eggs, so you need to redose after 8 days to try and kill any newly hatched flukes, but before they have time to lay new eggs (that's a trick!).

For future reference, here is my article on basic quarantine:
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/current-quarantine-protocol.825055/
Jay

 

[W31Olds]

Tough to say exactly what was going on. I presume you were using Prazipro? The cloudiness after treating with prazipro is due to the solvent used (a type of glycol). That gets consumed by bacteria (so does the prazi itself) and that in turn can cause a bacterial bloom. In turn, the bacteria can strip oxygen from the water. You need to add good aeration (not just circulation) when treating with that.

Another issue that can crop up is with fish that have heavy fluke infections - the prazi knocks all of the thousands of flukes off the fish, but then, there are thousands of holes in the fish's skin and the fish bleeds out. If it survives that, there is still a chance the holes will be invaded with bacteria and become infected.

Both emperor angels and purple tangs are very prone to egg laying flukes. Prazi doesn't kill fluke eggs, so you need to redose after 8 days to try and kill any newly hatched flukes, but before they have time to lay new eggs (that's a trick!).

For future reference, here is my article on basic quarantine:
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/current-quarantine-protocol.825055/
Jay

I agree, I was puzzled by this outcome also. I failed to mention that I used Prazipro and had an airstone running the entire quarantine period and was planning on dosing more than once but was concerned after the water turned so cloudy. I did a postmortem (the best i could) and did not notice anything unusual on the Tang under 5X magnification so I thought the freshwater dip was too much as the fish was really breathing hard after the dip and died some hours later and figured maybe being a smallish fish might have been a contributing factor along with many dead flukes causing blood loss. This is the second juv. emp angel I have tried to get though quarantine with the same result. They eat pellets, nori, etc. during the first few weeks and then start to decline. I don't know if the flukes multiply during the copperpower treatment to the point where the fish stop feeding or maybe some other infection, parasite, etc. is causing this. I kept a Juv. Emp many years ago that transitioned when reef tanks did not exist, corals were not even sold, no one quarantined, and found it a very easy fish to keep except for the fact that very little was known about HLLE so it had a mild case of that.

 

[Jay Hemdal Verified Community Expert]

I agree, I was puzzled by this outcome also. I failed to mention that I used Prazipro and had an airstone running the entire quarantine period and was planning on dosing more than once but was concerned after the water turned so cloudy. I did a postmortem (the best i could) and did not notice anything unusual on the Tang under 5X magnification so I thought the freshwater dip was too much as the fish was really breathing hard after the dip and died some hours later and figured maybe being a smallish fish might have been a contributing factor along with many dead flukes causing blood loss. This is the second juv. emp angel I have tried to get though quarantine with the same result. They eat pellets, nori, etc. during the first few weeks and then start to decline. I don't know if the flukes multiply during the copperpower treatment to the point where the fish stop feeding or maybe some other infection, parasite, etc. is causing this. I kept a Juv. Emp many years ago that transitioned when reef tanks did not exist, corals were not even sold, no one quarantined, and found it a very easy fish to keep except for the fact that very little was known about HLLE so it had a mild case of that.

There is another possible underlying issue here; depending on the source, most emperor angels collected in the Philippines and Indonesia were collected with cyanide. That causes latent mortality in those fish, usually within 6 weeks of capture. There is no clear diagnostic tools to identify that, and the symptoms mimic many other issues. Purple tangs are not usually caught that way though. Purple tangs can come with their own issues due to the long supply chain involved. Many Red Sea fish are caught there, and then resold to other countries and then resold to the US. This takes a lot of extra transport time, and creates more chances that the fish will suffer from that, or pick up diseases along the supply chain. For example, there is an exporter in East Africa that imports fish from the Red Sea and then ships them to the US, where they may go through two other wholesalers before being finally sold to a LFS.

 

[W31Olds]

There is another possible underlying issue here; depending on the source, most emperor angels collected in the Philippines and Indonesia were collected with cyanide. That causes latent mortality in those fish, usually within 6 weeks of capture. There is no clear diagnostic tools to identify that, and the symptoms mimic many other issues. Purple tangs are not usually caught that way though. Purple tangs can come with their own issues due to the long supply chain involved. Many Red Sea fish are caught there, and then resold to other countries and then resold to the US. This takes a lot of extra transport time, and creates more chances that the fish will suffer from that, or pick up diseases along the supply chain. For example, there is an exporter in East Africa that imports fish from the Red Sea and then ships them to the US, where they may go through two other wholesalers before being finally sold to a LFS.

I suspected that possibility also with the Angels. The Purple Tang was doing well swimming and eating but scratching so that's why I was going to start another round of Prazi after the freshwater dip, however it clearly was super stressed after the dip and probably passed some hours later. That's why I wondered if certain species and the age of the fish make the dip riskier. I would think dipping a juvenile fish might be a bad idea so will refrain from that. Also, I just checked the total ammonia of the Quarantine Tank still setup using my Red Sea kit and it looks like 1.2 which is high and a PH of 8.0 I'll get a seachem badge to monitor in the future and if I get another Angel, I will probably go with a captive bred one.

 

[Jay Hemdal Verified Community Expert]

I suspected that possibility also with the Angels. The Purple Tang was doing well swimming and eating but scratching so that's why I was going to start another round of Prazi after the freshwater dip, however it clearly was super stressed after the dip and probably passed some hours later. That's why I wondered if certain species and the age of the fish make the dip riskier. I would think dipping a juvenile fish might be a bad idea so will refrain from that. Also, I just checked the total ammonia of the Quarantine Tank still setup using my Red Sea kit and it looks like 1.2 which is high and a PH of 8.0 I'll get a seachem badge to monitor in the future and if I get another Angel, I will probably go with a captive bred one.

There is a theory that because of their higher surface to volume ratio, that smaller fish are more sensitive to chemicals in the water, as well as being more sensitive to changes in water chemistry, including changes in salinity. I know for SURE that this happens with larval fishes (the most extreme difference in volume to surface area) and logic then indicates that this same issue is also present in larger than larval fish (but still smaller than regular sized fish of the same species). I can't prove that though.....