Help with our Morish Idiol

The Ficke Fam · 08-22-2006, 07:44 PM

We purchased a Morish Idiol about 4 weeks ago. He is eating great and doing great. I had him in our q. tank for about a week and then put him into our main tank. About a week ago he had these (few) small white spots on his tail fin and now the spots seem to be getting larger. He is the only fish with these spots. HELP!! we do not know what this is nor do we know what we should do, any suggestions? Thank you! rficke@bloomer.net
Could anyone tell us if there is an Eau Claire Reef Club meeting schedule for Aug. Sept. ? Thank you!

lfish · 08-22-2006, 10:32 PM

Fish has white spot/ICh disease. get some garlic juice and soak your fish food in it. Feed this a couple of times a day. this helped me to overcome fish sick with ICH. If you do not have corals in tank, maybe you can try a different ICH medicine treatment.

good luck, keep us posted.

Mr.Reef · 08-22-2006, 10:44 PM

The best cure for ich , but not the cheapest is a uv-sterilizer.

Afish4u · 08-22-2006, 11:15 PM

The Garlic works great. Plus my cleaner shrimp helped out (At least I think so. It will take a long time and it is no guarantee. But it is the safest.

DevilBoy · 08-23-2006, 06:21 AM

it may also be lymphocytis (sp) are the white bumps raised?

davidsreef · 08-23-2006, 09:31 AM

There are many ways to treat ich, I tried a method but didn't have any luck cause I killed my two fish by using a quaranteen tank and doing a hyposalinity treatment. I think my downfall was that I didn't have an accurate way to measure my salinity (I had a hydrometer, which I found out afterwards was WAAAYYY off ). Your best bet is to research Ich and go from there.
It is a parasite that has a strange life cycle inwhich it attaches to a fish, eats a little from the host, drops off in to the water. At this time it seems like the fish is all better, but then the parasite reproduces in the sand and comes back again, just 10X stronger. There are copper medications, but that will kill your snails, corals, ect. so you would have to do that in a quaranteen tank. I have heard that garlic will help, but I don't know if I would want to soley use that. A UV could also help, but yes it is expensive. Do some reading on UV to see if its worth it. If you take all of the fish out of your display, and treat them for ich in a qt tank for about a month you can break the life cycle of the ich parasite in your display tank and at the same time cure the fish of the problem that is on their flesh. This takes time and good test kits to make sure your parameters in your qt tank are stable (could have also been my problem).
Do some reading online about ich, its life cycle (I believe its important to understand what your fighting here) and all potential treatments. If you have any questions please feel free to post here or PM me.
Good luck!

DevilBoy · 08-23-2006, 03:37 PM

here is a photo of a tang with lymphocystis

pogodzib · 08-23-2006, 03:38 PM

If the sopts are getting bigger, then it may not be Ich. If it is ich and the spots showed up about a week ago, they should have disappeared by now and may show up again soon by 10 fold. If the spots are getting larger, the fish may have some sort of fungus growing on it which requires different treatment than ich treatment. The only two proven ways to erraticate ich is by hyposalinity and/or copper. Both can kill fish easily if not done correctly and requires that the treatment be done in a q-tank. I prefer using hyposalinity. Garlic, UV, Ozone, etc... may help, but is not a guaranteed solution.

Please let us know how many spots are on the fish and a rough size of them (pinhead or larger). Posting a picture would help us identify the disease easier.

FYI - For future reference, since you already have a q-tank, try to quarantine all new fish for at least 3 weeks. Erraticating diseases in a reef tank can be difficult and often requires removing all of the fish from the tank for 4-6 weeks.

schneijt · 08-23-2006, 05:29 PM

Amen to quarentine tanks. I have to agree with their use; the easiest way to fight a disease is to never let it get into the display tank to begin with. Good luck with whatever treatment options you implement. It happens to all of us at some point.

Wish I could be more help, but everything that's been said so far is what I would have said anyway.

-Joe

The Ficke Fam · 08-25-2006, 07:46 AM

Thank you everyone for the GREAT!! advice hubby is going to post some photos of our fish. After talking with Marine Depot's John, we have concluded that he has lymphocystis. John gave us a few suggestions as well. Hubby will be posting the info soon! Again, thank you all for all you help. RF.

The Ficke Fam · 08-25-2006, 02:01 PM

All, thanks for your help. We believe this is lymphocystis and are already starting to observe a decrease of it on this fish.

Here's some info we learned from John (at Marine Depot) which may be helpful to others

- It's not contagious, so quarantine was not necessary
- Treating a Moorish Idol with copper or Rx is a death sentence

He gave us 3 options:

(1) Do nothing and live with the possibility that the fish may have this forever. Apparently the fish will live a healthy life but just have these growths on it. If they were around the gils or mouth that would be more serious for health.

(2) Remove the fish and manually scrape these areas clean and then treat the scaped areas with lugal iodine. For newbies like us, John gave a mortality rate of about 40% doing this -- we opted not to.

(3) Add some blue neon gobbies to the tank as they are know to remove lymphocystis. It's not a guarantee, but apparently this has been documented. We opted for this option; however those guys aren't in the tank yet and already all but 1 spot is gone from this guy, so option #1 was good as well.

Here are some useful links for further reference:

http://www.vet.uga.edu/vpp/clerk/Kurkjian/index.htm
http://www.aquarticles.com/articles/...phocystis.html

pogodzib · 08-25-2006, 04:18 PM

Glad to hear that the Moorish Idol is doing better.

lfish · 08-26-2006, 12:49 AM

wow, what an incredible fish. I am glad he is getting better. What other fish or corals do you guys have?

The Ficke Fam · 09-07-2006, 07:06 PM

We have a 150 gal tank with lots of live rock several Elephant ear mushrooms, Fish: Moorish Idol, *6" Blue Angle, 2" Flame angle, 3" Rock Beauty, 2" Percula Clownfish, 4" clarky Clownfish6" Regal Tank, 4" Regal Tank, 6" Sailfin Tang, 4" Longnose hawkfish and a few other small friends.

Sorry about the broken link...