Lachri
Well-known member
- Location
- Dallas, TX
My mantra these days is "why am I doing this to myself?!?!"
I am not totally new to reef keeping. I kept a tank from '95-2006. January 1st 2019 I went to a LFS to look into getting a planted betta tank going. I left with an already set up/cycled 13.5 gallon Fluval Evo and clownfish...complete with brooklynella instead. That wasn't really a thing back when I kept a reef before. I went fallow and eventually got my current black storm and picasso clowns. I've cared for my little mini reef successfully since then with no issues. I figured HEY! I've got this stuff down! I read articles and threads NON STOP about reef keeping on forums. I'm ready to upgrade! **insert previously mentioned mantra here**
My nano is now my coral/invert quarantine. I'm SO paranoid about parasites at this point so I wanted to make sure to do everything possible to avoid issues there. and I'm far too attached to these darn clownfish.
Ignore the cup in the tank...I'm trying to catch a firefish.
I got a new Planet aquarium (above) on 4/21/21. My clowns got moved in once it was cycled. The sump holds about 20 gallons of water. It's got a sicce pump and two sicce powerheads. These are all wifi but after about two weeks they wouldn't connect to the wifi/app. I've tried resetting them and they still won't connect. I'm not super impressed on that front. To be fair I've not reached out to sicce yet. They otherwise work well I guess. I have two Kessil tuna blue lights. My protein skimmer is a red starfish...some off-brand because they were out of any other skimmer at the time. It works well though so no complaints yet. I made a DIY screen lid but after using it for a few months I'm making a new/better one. I will post that when I get it done.
I've posted this in separate threads so I apologize for being repetitive, but I want to get everything into one post so I can document my journey. All went well and I ordered some pre-quarantined fish. That too went well until nearly two weeks later when one started breathing heavy and died about 12 hours later. I dismissed it as maybe being the virus that bangaii cardinals get since all the other fish were fine. A few days later and the firefish started flashing. The next day some of the fish appeared to be breathing heavy but all ate well. I removed the carbon, added an air stone, and dosed prazipro. I'm not positive what my water volume is, so I treated the tank for 60 gallons. Probably too little, but within seconds my clowns started shaking their heads like crazy, and tiny white dots came from their gills. All the fish flashed a bit scratching their faces for a few days but otherwise were breathing normally again.
A couple more days go by and one of the firefish developed a white spot. This is when I really started stressing. I immediately dosed the tank with 7.5ml of H202. I repeated this for 3 days every 12 hours. Sometimes one of the firefish would have a few more spots, sometimes none. None of the fish were behaving unusually and all eating well. After 3 days I pulled my cleaner shrimp and put him in my coral quarantine (some have reported losing their cleaners after about a week of h202 so it seemed the safer choice), and upped my dosage to 10ml 3x day. No other fish have developed spots yet (as of writing this we're at 6 days since I noticed the first spot).
6 days after the first prazipro treatment and the fish started breathing heavily again. By day 7 (which was my planned day to retreat) they were really showing symptoms. Spending time at the water surface, the clowns tilting sideways...sort of like a dog with an ear infection (sorry, I used to work at a vet...this is where most of my similes come from). I treated the tank with the second dose and everyone immediately responded. About 4 hours later I realized I forgot to take the polyfilter out of the sump /facepalm. That was Friday, this is now Sunday night that I'm writing this and I am seeing a few fish yawn and a bit more flashing (targeting the face) today than I've seen lately. I've read where someone had success treating their main tank (as I'm doing) with treatments at 72 hours apart.
I have a few hypotheses on the fluke issue:
Dates of treatments/deaths/etc so far:
7/19/21 bangaii cardinal starts breathing heavy and dies 12 hours later
7/23/21 dosed 25ml prazipro, fish responded well
7/26/21 first noticed white spot on firefish, dosed 7.5ml H2O2 every 12 hours for next 3 days
7/29/21 pm. Notice fish starting to breathe heavily again
7/30/21 25ml prazipro, fish responded well again, upped h202 to 10ml every 8 hours
8/1/21 Fish look like they're being more irritated from the gill flukes again. Yawning/flashing like they were before the last prazi treatment.
As of tonight, everyone is still eating well (most are at the corner of the tank begging for more food).
Non parasite info: Diatoms finally have let up and I seem to be moving onto a GHA stage. I'm not at all surprised there though because I've been overfeeding frozen like crazy since I've been worried about the fish being ill. I've not tested my water since all of this started so no reason to post results from 2 weeks ago. Actually, when I test next maybe I will post those results along with the results from before. I'm curious to see the difference in nitrates and phos with all this feeding.
I'm going to be doing an eDNA test and will update with what that shows. I will also keep updating with dosing of prazi and h202.
Right now I have my original two clowns (picasso female, black storm male), a royal gramma, tail spot blenny, 2 purple firefish that bicker a lot and I'm working on trapping one to move into another tank, a citron clown goby and a green clown goby. I've not lost anyone since the Bangaii cardinal 2 weeks ago.
For coral I have a toadstool leather, multiple frags of zoas, serveral types of mushrooms. The coral so far doesn't seem remotely bothered by anything I've done.
I still ask myself constantly "WHY am I doing this?!?!" I need to learn not to stress so much over this tank if I want to enjoy it more. The one thing that keeps me somewhat positive is if the h202 works for me, this will change everything in how I respond to/stress over some parasites. Right now the gill flukes seem to be the bigger issue.
The one thing I keep reminding myself is that I went through something similar when I got into keeping red eyed tree frogs. I had done about a year of research first and I've kept other frogs. These guys are sort of like a combo of PBTs and moorish idols when it comes to parasites and getting them to eat. When I finally got my frogs I went through several losses from parasites before I finally learned to do fecal tests on them myself and how to treat them. As hard as the first 6 months of caring for them were, I'm now no longer remotely worried about parasites since I know exactly what to do. I was seriously stressed with them for MONTHS while we tried figuring out what was wrong with them. The parasite issues with those frogs are kinda interesting, I should make an off-topic post about them. That is what I'm hoping for with these fish. If I can learn to deal with the two parasites they have now, I'm hoping when I am on the other end I won't be so stressed in the future. Right now I'm still feeling super super guilty for introducing parasites to my clownfish.
(photo of one of my girls, "Murky")
If anyone has words of encouragement for enjoying your tanks more than stressing I would love to hear them. I don't mind normal maintenance/water testing/etc...it's the parasites that stress me out. Well, that and power outages but I have battery backups and a power generator if needed.
I am not totally new to reef keeping. I kept a tank from '95-2006. January 1st 2019 I went to a LFS to look into getting a planted betta tank going. I left with an already set up/cycled 13.5 gallon Fluval Evo and clownfish...complete with brooklynella instead. That wasn't really a thing back when I kept a reef before. I went fallow and eventually got my current black storm and picasso clowns. I've cared for my little mini reef successfully since then with no issues. I figured HEY! I've got this stuff down! I read articles and threads NON STOP about reef keeping on forums. I'm ready to upgrade! **insert previously mentioned mantra here**
My nano is now my coral/invert quarantine. I'm SO paranoid about parasites at this point so I wanted to make sure to do everything possible to avoid issues there. and I'm far too attached to these darn clownfish.
Ignore the cup in the tank...I'm trying to catch a firefish.
I got a new Planet aquarium (above) on 4/21/21. My clowns got moved in once it was cycled. The sump holds about 20 gallons of water. It's got a sicce pump and two sicce powerheads. These are all wifi but after about two weeks they wouldn't connect to the wifi/app. I've tried resetting them and they still won't connect. I'm not super impressed on that front. To be fair I've not reached out to sicce yet. They otherwise work well I guess. I have two Kessil tuna blue lights. My protein skimmer is a red starfish...some off-brand because they were out of any other skimmer at the time. It works well though so no complaints yet. I made a DIY screen lid but after using it for a few months I'm making a new/better one. I will post that when I get it done.
I've posted this in separate threads so I apologize for being repetitive, but I want to get everything into one post so I can document my journey. All went well and I ordered some pre-quarantined fish. That too went well until nearly two weeks later when one started breathing heavy and died about 12 hours later. I dismissed it as maybe being the virus that bangaii cardinals get since all the other fish were fine. A few days later and the firefish started flashing. The next day some of the fish appeared to be breathing heavy but all ate well. I removed the carbon, added an air stone, and dosed prazipro. I'm not positive what my water volume is, so I treated the tank for 60 gallons. Probably too little, but within seconds my clowns started shaking their heads like crazy, and tiny white dots came from their gills. All the fish flashed a bit scratching their faces for a few days but otherwise were breathing normally again.
A couple more days go by and one of the firefish developed a white spot. This is when I really started stressing. I immediately dosed the tank with 7.5ml of H202. I repeated this for 3 days every 12 hours. Sometimes one of the firefish would have a few more spots, sometimes none. None of the fish were behaving unusually and all eating well. After 3 days I pulled my cleaner shrimp and put him in my coral quarantine (some have reported losing their cleaners after about a week of h202 so it seemed the safer choice), and upped my dosage to 10ml 3x day. No other fish have developed spots yet (as of writing this we're at 6 days since I noticed the first spot).
6 days after the first prazipro treatment and the fish started breathing heavily again. By day 7 (which was my planned day to retreat) they were really showing symptoms. Spending time at the water surface, the clowns tilting sideways...sort of like a dog with an ear infection (sorry, I used to work at a vet...this is where most of my similes come from). I treated the tank with the second dose and everyone immediately responded. About 4 hours later I realized I forgot to take the polyfilter out of the sump /facepalm. That was Friday, this is now Sunday night that I'm writing this and I am seeing a few fish yawn and a bit more flashing (targeting the face) today than I've seen lately. I've read where someone had success treating their main tank (as I'm doing) with treatments at 72 hours apart.
I have a few hypotheses on the fluke issue:
- This could be velvet (I have no idea if I'm dealing with ich or velvet right now) and that is also aggravating the gills in addition to the gill flukes. I occasionally see the royal gramma hang out about a foot in front of the powerhead. Is he swimming towards the flow or just hanging out in that general area? I'm not positive.
- The h202 is minimizing the effectiveness of the PraziPro?
- The flukes are a bit resistant to the PraziPro? I mean these fish have been through quarantine and treated for this already so that would be possible, but the fish responded immediately when treated so that leads me to #4
- The life cycle of these flukes is shorter than we expect (would h202 affect this?).
Dates of treatments/deaths/etc so far:
7/19/21 bangaii cardinal starts breathing heavy and dies 12 hours later
7/23/21 dosed 25ml prazipro, fish responded well
7/26/21 first noticed white spot on firefish, dosed 7.5ml H2O2 every 12 hours for next 3 days
7/29/21 pm. Notice fish starting to breathe heavily again
7/30/21 25ml prazipro, fish responded well again, upped h202 to 10ml every 8 hours
8/1/21 Fish look like they're being more irritated from the gill flukes again. Yawning/flashing like they were before the last prazi treatment.
As of tonight, everyone is still eating well (most are at the corner of the tank begging for more food).
Non parasite info: Diatoms finally have let up and I seem to be moving onto a GHA stage. I'm not at all surprised there though because I've been overfeeding frozen like crazy since I've been worried about the fish being ill. I've not tested my water since all of this started so no reason to post results from 2 weeks ago. Actually, when I test next maybe I will post those results along with the results from before. I'm curious to see the difference in nitrates and phos with all this feeding.
I'm going to be doing an eDNA test and will update with what that shows. I will also keep updating with dosing of prazi and h202.
Right now I have my original two clowns (picasso female, black storm male), a royal gramma, tail spot blenny, 2 purple firefish that bicker a lot and I'm working on trapping one to move into another tank, a citron clown goby and a green clown goby. I've not lost anyone since the Bangaii cardinal 2 weeks ago.
For coral I have a toadstool leather, multiple frags of zoas, serveral types of mushrooms. The coral so far doesn't seem remotely bothered by anything I've done.
I still ask myself constantly "WHY am I doing this?!?!" I need to learn not to stress so much over this tank if I want to enjoy it more. The one thing that keeps me somewhat positive is if the h202 works for me, this will change everything in how I respond to/stress over some parasites. Right now the gill flukes seem to be the bigger issue.
The one thing I keep reminding myself is that I went through something similar when I got into keeping red eyed tree frogs. I had done about a year of research first and I've kept other frogs. These guys are sort of like a combo of PBTs and moorish idols when it comes to parasites and getting them to eat. When I finally got my frogs I went through several losses from parasites before I finally learned to do fecal tests on them myself and how to treat them. As hard as the first 6 months of caring for them were, I'm now no longer remotely worried about parasites since I know exactly what to do. I was seriously stressed with them for MONTHS while we tried figuring out what was wrong with them. The parasite issues with those frogs are kinda interesting, I should make an off-topic post about them. That is what I'm hoping for with these fish. If I can learn to deal with the two parasites they have now, I'm hoping when I am on the other end I won't be so stressed in the future. Right now I'm still feeling super super guilty for introducing parasites to my clownfish.
(photo of one of my girls, "Murky")
If anyone has words of encouragement for enjoying your tanks more than stressing I would love to hear them. I don't mind normal maintenance/water testing/etc...it's the parasites that stress me out. Well, that and power outages but I have battery backups and a power generator if needed.
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