Saving my Black Tang. How crazy of an idea is this?

[Humblefish]

About 4 months ago lost declivis butterfly Achiles tang and tusk fish to velvet or ick. Cross contaminated another tank and had a clown trigger cover in velvet . Used copper power and was able to save trigger . UV will do nothing with ick or velvet

Copper Power is another good chelated copper product.

 

[Breakthecycle2]

About 4 months ago lost declivis butterfly Achiles tang and tusk fish to velvet or ick. Cross contaminated another tank and had a clown trigger cover in velvet . Used copper power and was able to save trigger . UV will do nothing with ick or velvet

UV will work with ICH for management. It will not rid the tank completely.

 

[Fisher72]

I think many of you misunderstood my original plan. The idea was to run the drain of the 30 gal tank through a EA 50w UV. This in theory should kill all ick and velvet which passes through the UV at a low rate of 50 gal/hour. I realize the 30 will continue to be infected but the 240 display should not need a reset since no new infection from the 30 should contaminate it. I believe EA UV states volumes of 200gal/hour will kill ick I assume at 50 gal nothing will survive. Again the idea here was to get the black tang back in a reef environment and eating without needing to reset the clock on my main display.

For now I have a 20 gal cycling so the plan is to put him in there tomorrow without Cu hopefully he will eat. I may have to resort to putting him in the 30 should he not eat.

 

[Breakthecycle2]

I think many of you misunderstood my original plan. The idea was to run the drain of the 30 gal tank through a EA 50w UV. This in theory should kill all ick and velvet which passes through the UV at a low rate of 50 gal/hour. I realize the 30 will continue to be infected but the 240 display should not need a reset since no new infection from the 30 should contaminate it. I believe EA UV states volumes of 200gal/hour will kill ick I assume at 50 gal nothing will survive. Again the idea here was to get the black tang back in a reef environment and eating without needing to reset the clock on my main display.

For now I have a 20 gal cycling so the plan is to put him in there tomorrow without Cu hopefully he will eat. I may have to resort to putting him in the 30 should he not eat.

It's not a good idea. UV will not kill every single parasite. It's impossible to get them all. For that to even happen, every single free swimming parasite would need to pass through the UV.

 

[Humblefish]

It's not a good idea. UV will not kill every single parasite. It's impossible to get them all. For that to even happen, every single free swimming parasite would need to pass through the UV.

^^ Agree; it is impossible to know whether 100% eradication was achieved when using a UV. You could be going fallow for nothing.

 

[Mel 2038]

Can you just take the 30 gal out of the Loop for awhile? I know what your feeling. This happened to me some years back.

 

[Fisher72]

Good news, my BT is eating great today. I now have a 20L setup too so if he stops again I have a place to put him. Hopefully it won't be needed.

 

[Mel 2038]

That's Great! I wish you the best with him.

 

[Fisher72]

Here is a picture of my BT in QT he is now eating great. What seems to have helped was lowering the Cu from .5mg/L to ~.45mg/L. Basically it was at .5 and removed 5 gal of water and replaced it with 5 gal of untreated water. He is now actively chasing flakes around the tank and eating. I will try raising the Cu back to 0.5 today with the hopes he continues to eat.

 

[Fisher72]

I am currently about 10 days into QT/fallow here are a couple of shots of both the 46 and 72 QT tanks. The 46 seems to be on auto pilot, no issues with Ammonia even though is has over 15 fish in it. The 72 is housing more larger fish including a large blonde naso, Angle, yellow and Cheveron tang, here I need to watch the Ammonia much more closely with water changes every 2-3 days.

You can see I have foam filters in each tank, they were seeded with DR. Tims since I didn't have time to seed them in the tank. I also put a piece of LR which I had in my sump into each tank at the initial setup to help with ammonia build up. For whatever reason the ammonia badge in the 46 has not moved off "0" trace in 10 days, I have only done 15 gal of water changes. The 72 on the other hand has had multiple water changes of 30 gal, here the badge seems to always have a small amount of green. Hopefully I can get this in check for the 30 days of treating with Cu.

Thanks for all your help.

 

[Deinonych]

Glad to hear things are progressing well. Personally, I would augment the ammonia badges with test kits just to make sure. The badges are handy for quasi real time ammonia monitoring, but I never put my faith in them 100%. YMMV.