Well i've had an outbreak of uronema, then velvet and now a bacterial infection on my 2 angels all in the space of 2 very stressful weeks.
Losses so far; ( in order)
5" Goniistius vestitus, caught it myself in a rockpool. Uronema
5" Stethojulis balteata, unclear but suspected uronema. Was missing for 3 days, eventually it's dead and badly decomposed corpse floated up from under the sand.
3" fat, conditioned happy Anampses neoguinacus - internal uronema
8-9" frozen-eating A.lennardi - external uronema
3" Chaetodon declivis. fully pellet trained and almost $1500 in australia - velvet
5" Harlequin tusk - copper poisoning
3" Halichoeres richmondi - still alive but barely. Copper poisoning again, may be recovering slightly. Very frayed fins, missing scales on one side of the body, bloated stomach and inability to swim in a straight line or bury itself in sand. Kind of similar symptoms to swim bladder damage.
4" Pomacanthus maculosus and 6" Chaetodontoplus personifer, still alive but battling a very aggressive necrotic bacteria infection.
The copper poisoning was caused by the hanna copper checker i bought being faulty. After the butterfly died from velvet (the personifer almost died from it too but recovered), i dosed coppersafe immediately and went the next day to a store to get a copper checker. The first test i did read 1.19, i added about 100mls more copper and went to retest at which point it broke internally or something and kept giving me an error message which i couldn't fix. the next day i got a new one which first read 2.28 which was perfect but i wanted to get it to 2.50 so i added another 50mls of coppersafe. I testes again 4 times and i got the reading of 3.72 - 3.92 averaging 3.90. I did several more tests and got the same result, so over the course of 2 days i did a 50% WC to get the copper level down to normal. I was only able to do 15% at a time. My Thalassoma, sailfin tang, Quoyi parrot, striped snapper, red coris, pixy wrasse and a couple other fish didn't seem to care but my richmondi and tusk took it really badly. My mimic tang developed a fair bit of lateral line erosion and my 2 angels looked pale and stressed most of the time.
So yeah, been an awful 2 weeks with some losses that really sucked. I'm hopeful the richmondi will pull through, 2 days ago it was just spinning in circles, today it can kind of keep itself level in the water but still has a bulge on the belly.
The plan going forward is to maintain a therapeutic copper level for 30-45 days to clear the DT of velvet and ich. Formalin dosing for uronema (on day 8 now, 20mls daily) and hybrid ttm on all new fish. I guess i've learned my lesson :(
