What the crap happened to my Exquisite FireFish?!?

[SmallHobby]

a brainstorm to shore up future fish health where possible:

in this tank have you added wet items from a pet store in the last several months...new frags/snails / some macro etc

reason am asking: looking for potential disease input vectors if any, just to factor alongside any mechanical causes. I know you're interested in not repeating the issue if possible and I didn't see if we've got a solid vector control plan in place for the setup.

Thank you for brainstorming with me. I am just so perplexed. I know that my clownfish, who was in the tank from the beginning 2 years ago, is a big bully if anyone goes near her spot at the very top of the tank by the power head but I have never ever seen my firefish go up there and his territory is on a completely different side of the tank.

I have not added a single thing, including crabs/snails (which I normally get from LiveAquaria) since 1/26/21…literally one year. The tank was in homeostasis and nothing extra was needed. It is a FOWLR. I did switch pellet food recently on 1/12/22 to Hikari.

I did have some purple algae problem on the sand…sucked it out and put in new live sand in one spot. Natures Ocean Bio Active Live Sand.

 

[SmallHobby]

It looks like the fish caudal fin is missing all the way down to the hypural plate - fish typically don’t survive that, the bone becomes infected.
Most cases of this develop from mechanical damage….if you rule out another fish attacking it, could it have gotten stuck and injured it’s tail struggling?
Rarely, a virulent bacterial infection will just start up on its own with no prior injury.
If you can get a clearer picture under white lights I might see it differently, but at this point, I don’t see any possible treatment, sorry.

Jay

I’m sorry to bother again. My husband was not ready to give up on him but it is clear to me that we need to humanely euthanize our fish, which will be done promptly. The MS-222 has not yet arrived.

However, today the caudal fin looks substantially worse despite being quarantined in the main tank. I did a solo pic and a side by side with L today and R yesterday. I also noticed circular areas of lighter coloration along his underside towards the tail. Does that suggest bacteria? fungus? Do I need to treat the entire tank for something? To prevent this from happening to my other animals? I have a clownfish, tangaroa goby, pistol shrimp, x5 Hawaiian feather dusters and various hermit crabs and snails. No corals at all, though a few aptasia.

As I mentioned to another hobbiest, I did recently add live sand from Natures Ocean Bio Active Live Sand maybe 1 week ago and switch to Hikari 042220 Carnivore Medium pellets. I also always use Imagitarium Pacific Ocean water for all my water changes since the very beginning. Should I have mixed my own water? Could it have been the sand or the water or the food?

 

[brandon429]

I fully believe the sand and food didn't cause that, and that your biosecurity/ input risk for new disease is better than just about anyone posting for help on this page of the forum. See if Jay agrees but I don't think that issue above is a transmissible risk to the rest of the system given those controls in place for one year or better.

If we read down the list of presentations for help on this page few have gone a year without direct biosecurity input risks. Without even asking them we can select 'find all posts' from their main page and find a post about such new inputs within a few months of the disease expression in most cases

Delayed onset disease emergence i have no idea about/ mechanical damage to that fin in some way and resulting loss as Jay predicted seems really possible now

 

[Jay Hemdal]

I’m sorry to bother again. My husband was not ready to give up on him but it is clear to me that we need to humanely euthanize our fish, which will be done promptly. The MS-222 has not yet arrived.

However, today the caudal fin looks substantially worse despite being quarantined in the main tank. I did a solo pic and a side by side with L today and R yesterday. I also noticed circular areas of lighter coloration along his underside towards the tail. Does that suggest bacteria? fungus? Do I need to treat the entire tank for something? To prevent this from happening to my other animals? I have a clownfish, tangaroa goby, pistol shrimp, x5 Hawaiian feather dusters and various hermit crabs and snails. No corals at all, though a few aptasia.

As I mentioned to another hobbiest, I did recently add live sand from Natures Ocean Bio Active Live Sand maybe 1 week ago and switch to Hikari 042220 Carnivore Medium pellets. I also always use Imagitarium Pacific Ocean water for all my water changes since the very beginning. Should I have mixed my own water? Could it have been the sand or the water or the food?

Hi,

External Saprolegnea fungus, like you see so often in freshwater fish, don't grow in seawater, so this is most likely a bacterial infection. To treat it, you would need to move the fish to a treatment tank and dose with a strong, broad spectrum gram negative antibiotic such as Furan-2. I normally don't suggest mixing antibiotics, but in this case, you might want to do so, you'll need to treat very aggressively. You could use Maracyn 1 at the same time as the Furan.

In almost every case, the bacteria isolated from lesions like this are found to be present in the tank as normal species. Therefore, there isn't any risk that this will spread to other fish (as long as they don't suffer some sort of injury or skin damage).

Good luck!

Jay

 

[SmallHobby]

Just to conclude this thread, we decided to euthanize our firefish today utilizing the clove oil method that was readily available at home. Furan-2 could not be located online or LFS despite my best efforts and his condition worsened. If any other beginner finds themselves in a similar situation, I wanted to provide a little more detail below.

In addition to the extremely helpful information on how to humanely euthanize fish provided by Jay Hemdal above, we also researched the clove oil method more and employed and airstone to keep the clove oil readily mixed to ensure adequate anesthesia and death from this website: https://modestfish.com/how-to-euthanize-fish/ . I will say that I made my husband do it and he said that the fish did not seem to suffer or be attempting to escape and that the fish was noted to quickly lean to one side and then turned upside down. We left him in for a full 30 minutes and then I transferred him to a plastic bag with some of the clove oil water to the freezer to be disposed of in the morning.

Thanks to everyone in the community for their support. I have had two fish deaths previously, one who died in transport from Live Aquaria and one who magically jumped to the back section of our BioCube when the lid was closed. Hazards of the hobby I assumed (though did shed tears for the fish who jumped in the back of the tank) but losing our firefish this way was too heartbreaking. I unfortunately do believe that the current occupants will live out their days and that will be it for me with this hobby. So much care and work and investment (we had an Apex system too) to have a fish die in this manner and not be able to do anything to save him.