sick fish - help

H

HkySk8r187

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Oct 18, 2004
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I went on vacation for 5 days and had to have a friend feed the fish for me while I was gone. I made sure everything with the tank was perfect before leaving so make sure it would be ok for 5 days without my attention. When I came home the tank was full of green algea, one of my hermit crabs was dead (dont know where the shell went, just saw legs in the tank, and the body was eaten or decomposed), and my yellow tang and clown fish have little white dots on them. My yellow tang has also lost a bit of his color. I measured all water parameters when I returned to the mess and saw that everything was normal other than a very small ammonia spike and slightly high ph.

I fixed the green algea problem by doing a water change and giving less light per day to the tank. The algea disappeared very quickly, ph went back down to 8.2, and the ammonia went back to 0 when I changed the water. Everything in this department seems fine now.

Now here for the questions about the white dots on half my fish. They are tiny tiny white dots. The yellow tang had several on his fins and body, and the clown had just 2 or 3 of them on his body. My cleaner shrimp seemed to really want to clean the yellow tang and appeared to be removing the white dots from him. A couple days later the fish are still acting normal, and the dots have disappeared. I dont know if they fell off or if the shrimp ate them all.

I have seen sick fish at a fish store that had white spots but the spots on the one I saw were large and looked like some sort of fungus. The spots on my fish are just like one little spec of white dust. What do you think it may be and what are solutions to fix it if I need to do anything about it?

Thanks for everyone's help...I'm a little worried.

ps - I hear some treatments will kill coral and I have 1 flowerpot coral so please keep that in mind when helping me out.
 
still no replies :sad Please help me with my fish. Thanks.
 
hmmm

well, cleaner shrimp cant get rid of ich becasur ich is inside them. but i dont know if you still have it, because my green chomis have ich, and sometimes it goes away, and then sometimes it reapears its weird. but if you havnt seen the white spots for more then 3 days, everything looks good
 
Ich can be itty bitty white specs on the fish? I was under the assumption that Ich was larger white spots...not ones the size of a spec of dust or grain of salt.
 
Unless there is a drastic size difference between sw and fw ich then ich can pretty easily be described as "salt" crystals. I've been lucky enough to never have had it in my reef tank.

You may want to keep a really close eye on the entire tank, water quality is gonna be darn tough to keep up with the fish load and the size tank you have. And that can start a viscious cycle of unstable water quality, stress, ich and other disease issues.
 
4 fish is a lot for a 29 gal tank??
 
I can testify that its extremely difficult to distinguish between white spot and Oodinium in marine aquaria. You might want to look at my sad saga which is currently on the first page of this forum (If you are the worrying type I wouldn't bother). The spots I have seen are much smaller than the whitespot you see in freshwater tanks more like grains of powder which are barely visible on the body, there are larger spots on the fins which could be white spot but yet again they dont look the same as the freshwater variant. I think Orion Girls last bit of advice seems to be the best, if you can set up a quarantine tank do so and treat the fish in isolation with copper based compounds. I have spent nearly a month trying to irradicate my problem with reef/invert safe medicines. By the way cleaner fish/inverts wont sort out the problem, but I you have already got them they might be doing some good.
 
No, four isn't always too much for a 29... but the fourth fish you have in there, the yellow tang, needs more than a 29 gallon tank, the other three fish are noted by numerous books and other sources to be "okay" in a 30 gallon tank. Most people (note I said most, not all) suggest 50-75 gallons for a yellow tang.

Of course, if you are upgrading to a larger tank then it's all a moot point.

Hope you get the answers you need and your fish do well. :)
 
Well the yellow tang is very small and when he gets too big I'll either set up the 80 gal I want to buy or let someone else have him.
 
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