Reef safe Ick medication

[cameron]

Cleaning shrimp as Panda pointed out somewhere aren't known to eat ick, but they do pick this kind of dead skin and such off a fish making it happier and thus more likely to fight off the parasite naturally. Anything natural you can do to make it better for your fish I say give it a try.

 

[xyzpdq0121]

OMG.. Again I have to agree with Panda here. Looks like Ich to me... Still looks like Ich and will continue to look like Ich. Now, I have ran across a really weird illness lately that we could not ID. But it was more like divots in the skin with worms sticking out of them.

 

[patrick214]

email wet-web with all those pics and he will resolve it all for us. i dont understand why everyone thinks the only disease a fish can have is ick. My pbt has had exactly what his fish is showing something dangling off the outside of the fishs skin and it was completely distinguishable from ick, it just did not look the same as ick. if you enlarge the first pics he posted they are not salt grains they are actually large and look to be on the outside of the fish. the sloughing only convinces me more. this is not ick and will continue not to look like ick.

 

[patrick214]

ick enters thorugh the gills and eats the fishs tissue from the inside the sloughing could be a response to ick but he would see some spots embedded under the skin, he said they all appeared to be on the outside.

 

[jmaneyapanda]

If you insist it is not ick, then what do you think it is?

 

[xyzpdq0121]

Patrick, I have Bob Fenner's private e-mail address. If you really want me to, I will send the pictures along to him. But I will bet you a frag I know what he will say, "If you want to know, take a sample from the fish and put it on a slide! Looks like Ich to me..." Not to sound pompous, because I have been known to be wrong before, but you are talking to Jeremy, who is about as knowledgeable about fish illness as they come and me, who has spent the past year researching and writing about Ich. It is not that I think everything is Ich.. Believe me, I have slides of Brook around here, I have slides of PM research in clams around here, I have slides of velvet around here, I have slides on internal protozoa around here. But aside from a cancerous or viral infection (Which this does not look like) tell me what else you think it can be?!? Perhaps a micro/sporidean or subcutaneous protozoan... but I highly doubt it. Without a slide and sample, it is hard to tell.

 

[jmaneyapanda]

looks about the same to me
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[jmaneyapanda]

Xyzpdq0121;131948 wrote: Patrick, I have Bob Fenner's private e-mail address. If you really want me to, I will send the pictures along to him. But I will bet you a frag I know what he will say, "If you want to know, take a sample from the fish and put it on a slide! Looks like Ich to me..." Not to sound pompous, because I have been known to be wrong before, but you are talking to Jeremy, who is about as knowledgeable about fish illness as they come and me, who has spent the past year researching and writing about Ich. It is not that I think everything is Ich.. Believe me, I have slides of Brook around here, I have slides of PM research in clams around here, I have slides of velvet around here, I have slides on internal protozoa around here. But aside from a cancerous or viral infection (Which this does not look like) tell me what else you think it can be?!? Perhaps a micro/sporidean or subcutaneous protozoan... but I highly doubt it. Without a slide and sample, it is hard to tell.

Exactly. Microsporidean was my other thought, but in several fish, all of the sudden I think excludes that as a possibility. Especially when they are all established fish.

 

[jmaneyapanda]

Patrick214;131932 wrote: ick enters thorugh the gills and eats the fishs tissue from the inside the sloughing could be a response to ick but he would see some spots embedded under the skin, he said they all appeared to be on the outside.

Ick doesnt "enter through the gills" and infect the rest of the body. It certainly does attack the gills also, but this is an innaccurate statement.

 

[patrick214]

I'm not really sure what i think it is, i was told by a knowledgeable reefer that the sypmtoms my pbt had were lymph and they look identical to what his fish has. He expalined many belive lymph to be some sort of cancerous growth or tumor but many times it is white growths on the outside of the skin due to the virus causing an enlargement of skin cells that can often look like ick. Now you are probably right this may not be lymph, but i dont understand how it could be ick if there doesnt appear to be anything embedded under the skin. Fish from different regions can carry things that are benign to them and completely new to others so i think there is a multitude of things it could be. some sort of fungal disorder, microsporidian, or protozoan would be my guess but beyond that im not entirely sure. im not trying to sound arrogant here it was just really my opinion that it looked a little large to be ick and was on the outside of the skin. have either of you seen instances before where the ick appears to be completely external without any signs of adults embedded under the skin?

 

[patrick214]

As far as emailing fenner is concerned, i think his opinion is always worthwhile. If he says thats ick you idiot, ill certainly feel pretty dumb, and ill personally apologize by finding a frag for ya, my worry is that i come across like a dbag on here trying to give my stance, in reality im just trying to help. but if you decide to email him make sure you tell him that the spots all appear to be on the skin externally not the typical sand under the skin look

 

[xyzpdq0121]

Patrick214;131968 wrote: have either of you seen instances before where the ick appears to be completely external without any signs of adults embedded under the skin?

Yes many times.. To tell you the truth, in most cases. I think you are a little off in your understanding about the life cycle of Ich and how it imbedds. The large stage is not under the skin. Think of the white spot as more like a pimple or the rear end of a tick. Most of the imbedded parasites you never see without either a) a skin sample or b) shortly before the cyst forms. I know I spread my article that I wrote around a bit much, but it is one of the best sources for information (althought I have to update it with my newest research). You can check it out

 

[mojo]

I actually have been talking to Bruce Carlson and Charles Delbeek about it. Bruce didn't say that it wasn't Ick. I'm waiting to hear back from Delbeek right now (Hawaii is about 5 hrs behind). Brandon, if you wouldn't mind emailing Fenner, I'd be all ears.

I welcome all opinions here - none of us are experts, and the more information we've got, the better off we are. The best I can do at this point is to supply pictures...

 

[xyzpdq0121]

Patrick214;131979 wrote: As far as emailing fenner is concerned, i think his opinion is always worthwhile. If he says thats ick you idiot, ill certainly feel pretty dumb, and ill personally apologize by finding a frag for ya, my worry is that i come across like a dbag on here trying to give my stance, in reality im just trying to help. but if you decide to email him make sure you tell him that the spots all appear to be on the skin externally not the typical sand under the skin look

No, I know you are only trying to help and maybe this can be a learning experience for all of us. You just touch on a nerve with both Panda and I when it gets to fish pathology and illness. Heck, Panda and I do not agree half the time!!!

Brandon, if you wouldn't mind emailing Fenner, I'd be all ears.

If I find time, I will try to write him in the next day or two (I have a few other things to write him too so I got to find the time for a long e-mail).

 

[xyzpdq0121]

Mojo, can you get an upclose pic of the cyst like you did of the slime coat?

 

[jmaneyapanda]

Above all, you have three fish showing symptoms more or less overnight, is that correct Chris? If so, it is really a no brainer to me. Microsorideans are essentially fungi, and it would be near impossible for a fungal infection to strike like that, as far as Im concerned. If white area dissapear in the next day or two, this would really be all the evidence you would need, in my opinion.

But then again, I dont have the experience or background as Carlson, Fenner, or Delbeek.

 

[mojo]

The symptoms did all appear within a day or two of introducing several other fish (all small - two christmas wrasses, a radiant wrasse, and two firefish). It appeared on all my tangs (yellow, powder blue, and naso).

It also appeared on my fish in the nano tank, which is still a separate system. However, I got fish that were from the same place at the same time, and introduced them into the nano.

All fish in the system are healthy, and have been so for the past year. They've been through a good bit of stress with my recent move, but this is the first signs of problems in that year.

Mojo, can you get an upclose pic of the cyst like you did of the slime coat?

I'll try... getting macro pictures on somethign as skittish as my PBT is really tough... I'd normally try a smaller aperture and high shutter speed, but I don't have enough light, and a flash won't work well through the glass. But I'll try...

 

[mojo]

I heard back from Delbeek:

Aloha Chris,

Yuck ... that's some nasty looking Crypto for sure! As Bruce mentioned, we try to avoid Crypto by not adding new fish to an established tank, however, when first setting up a system you usually can't add a lot of fish at once, especially with large tanks, so you have no choice but to add more fish later, the key is to do so slowly and to quarantine fish. We rarely add fish without treating them in a q-tank first. Once Crypto is in the system you can't get it out, so now you have it or more likely you always had it. By adding so many new fish at once, you upset the status quo in terms of bioload and behavioral stress, and the fish could not longer keep the parasite at bay. You can try removing all the fish from the tank for at least a month, two would be better. Without a host, theoretically the parasite will have no host to infect and will die out. In practice, this does not always work. I am convinced that the parasite can sense whether there are fish present or not, and can go dormant if no fish are present. One way to "trick" them would be to take water from a tank with fish and add a few ounces to the tank with the disease and without fish. This may fool the parasites into thinking there are fish in the tank due to "fishy" chemicals in the water. I know a few people who have had some success with this technique.

I read through the thread, not sure what you want to accomplish by using an antibiotic like metrodizanol though. Many of the garlic products are of questionable value since the form of garlic they contain does not contain enough alycin (sp?) which is the active ingredient in garlic, it oxides very quickly once your cut the garlic, I have heard of people mincing the garlic and feeding it straight to the fish. Might be worth a try? I don't have any experience with the products mentioned in the thread.

If you can't remove the fish there are some other things to try.

1) Increase the temperature to the high 80s and try to cycle the parasite out of the tank. If there are corals in the tank this is probably not an option though but can be used in quarantine.

2) Add cleaner shrimp (fire shrimp are not very active cleaners IME), they will eat the parasites off the fish but won't do much about the cysts in the sand/gravel.

3) Do nothing, feed the fish well, even try garlic laced feeds if you have any or freshly minced garlic, and hope the fish will fight off the disease on their own. Fish have very effective immune systems and it is not unusual in systems with excellent water quality, for the fish to get better on their own. Of course, as Bruce mentioned, the parasite is still in the water, but it never reaches high levels. The problem will come again if/when you add new fish to the tank as these fish will have weakened immune systems and will probably come down with it.

As to what it is, there really is only one way to find out what you have and that is to do a skin and fin scrape and examine it under a microscope. Unless you do this, no one can tell you definitively what you have. The way to do this is to remove the fish and take a microscope slide and literally scrap the sides of the fish and fins, with the edge of the slide removing mucus and maybe a few scales, place a coverslip on it and take a look under a microscope. Most hobbyists don't have a microscope but maybe someone in your club does or has access to one? It is a really good idea for a club such as yours, to invest in a microscope that can be available to anyone in the club at anytime, as well as some good fish disease ID books. You can get fairly decent ones for under $500, cheaper than flying in a speaker and probably more useful in the long term. ;-)

Of what you listed Ich, Brooklynella, Lymphosystis, or microsporidean, it most likely is not Lymphocystis since this is not usually contagious and is viral, pray it is not Brooklynella as this is VERY difficult to deal with, microsporidean sounds a bit too exotic to me, my money is on ich and the globules you see on the powder blue may just be excess mucus production by the fish in response to the infection.

You can also try UV but in order to kill off a protozoan like ich, you will need a very high output on the order of 200,000 uW sec/m2. See Pablo Escobal's book Aquatic Systems Engineering for more info on how to properly size a UV sterilizer. I would be very skeptical of the claims in that thread that UV killed it off in the tank unless they were using a commercial unit that was properly sized and supplied with the proper water flow; otherwise I think it is just coincidence or the UV did something else to the water that helped improve the water quality like lower bacteria levels and/or reduce organics.

My advice would be to keep feeding the fish and make sure you have optimum water quality and high dissolved oxygen content and see if they don't recover on their own.

A painful lesson but ... a quarantine system is the best insurance you can get for your system. That and a microscope. After treating the fish in Q we always do a scraping and maybe even a gill snip, and take a look under the scope to make sure it is clean before we put them in a display system.

Aloha!
--
J. Charles Delbeek M.Sc.
Aquarium Biologist III
Waikiki Aquarium
University of Hawaii
2777 Kalakaua Ave.
Honolulu, HI, 96815

 

[FutureInterest]

That's an excellent response.

Interesting thought on ich possibly going dormant in a tank...

 

[xyzpdq0121]

Gosh, that Charles is a wise, WISE man!!!