Might have to eat my own words re: quarantine
 

So it looks like something I've added may have introduced velvet into my tank. Lost a tang yesterday, and it looks like my filefish isn't going to make it through the day. I've never actually seen velvet, so not sure that's what it is, but more of the fish are developing marks on them, and I'm not optimistic that this is going to end well.

Options? Best way to deal with this is find new tank, set it up somewhere, tear apart reef, catch fish and treat. Hope that the tank can go back together in some sort of fashion without killing all my corals.

What's option "B"?

As an aside, I won't be bringing any frags to the swap today, probably not worth the risk of spreading this.

Try herbtana. It's reef safe

That's terrible. I've gone through it myself and so have some friends.

Leaving it untreated will almost guarantee a near wipeout. Its a PITA but catching them out and treating them with some copper-based med. like Cupramine I think is the only way to stop M.V.

It looks like ick but much more small white specks and then it just coats the fish till they look kinda fuzzy. Nasty, nasty stuff.

Hope you come out of this better than I did. It almost caused me to quit the hobby.

Anthony

CRAP! I've never seen velvet either so I don't have anything to offer, other than just... CRAP!:sad:

Ouch that's my biggest fear. I don't have a quarantine tank either - so far I have been lucky -

Get a hold of Chin, Anthony or Tom R. They gone through this. Biggest thing is to act fast. Is it a reef tank or fowlr?

Full SPS reef with no chance of catching the fish. I'd have to tear it down.

I guess I have too, been doing this 12 years and I've never really seen velvet. Except I guess at Anthony's house, but mine aren't gasping.

Advanced marine velvet makes the fish look like they have been coated with flour, copper treatment and quarantine is the best way to treat it.

Fish with marine velvet get very twitchy and hide in the rocks

you can do the freshwater dip but that means having multiple hospital tanks where you dip the fish and put them in a fresh hospital tank every couple of days.......very labour intensive

Just lost the filefish. The problem is catching any of these fish, I'd really have to tear the tank apart. I may have to try and catch what I can with the fish trap, catch my wrasses at night while in the sand. The smaller ones might have to stay in, like the damsels and spotted goby. I'm going to try and set up a tank and catch what I can...

Good luck, helplessly watching all the fish die is the worst experience ever......

Ya, 2 down so far. I'm going to set up a tank and see what I can catch, then decide how to proceed. I may have to sacrifice a couple of smaller fish to save the corals. Tearing apart a tank this size with the amount of SPS I have would end badly.

Oh Crap Brad, I had Velvet hit my 65 gal ( total loss ) when I first started SW and could not find anyone around here that could help ( before CanReef) Good luck bud, I hope it turns out not to be MV.

might be best to see if someone can come give you a hand catching the fish or if you have to move rocks and such its always nice having a dry pair of hands on stand by.

sorry to hear about your fish man id say marie is right get em out and treated asap

Greg, pretty sure it is. It hit fast and hard. The filefish was only slightly a concern at 8am. Dead at 10:15.

Denny, the problem is I can't move rock. The design of the tank is such that all the corals essentially encrust the top layer of rock. If I start moving rock, I might as well tear the tank down.

AH SHYTE!! wish I could offer help bud, this sucks. Good luck

For those of you that have had this.. Is this the way it usually happens? If MV can kill so fast, it doesn't make sense to me that it would take 5-6 weeks AFTER introducing it into your tank for the outbreak to occur.

MV appears to kill fast because it isn't obvious in the early stages, fish appear to be a bit off colour (pale) and twitchy. It's only the final stage that it becomes obvious that there is a parasite in action

I have no idea what triggered it in my 65 gal but I did add a few coral and a couple fish a few weeks prior to MV totally wiping out the tank. Tried to treat all the fish but it was to late.

That is what has me puzzled. The last addition was maybe 5, 6 weeks ago. The fish was doing well, no marks, eating, not stressed. I would expect the pathogen to hit in week 1, not a month and a half later.

Brad, draining the tank of water may be the easiest way to go especially if you have someone else who can see where the fish are hiding and maybe gently keep the fish from going behind the rocks. I managed to catch all my fish including 2 neon gobies out of my fully stocked 175g that way without moving any rocks or corals

Here's a link to my old thread about MV nasty stuff. http://www.canreef.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=51938 I have pic's maybe a video of what it looks like in the final stages.

FYI some fish are immune to MV and even if one fish is left in the display and doesn't show signs of MV it can be a carrier of MV and when you reintroduce the fish you were able to treat they could catch it again. It took 2-3 weeks before signs were noticeable in my tank. I also didn't want to tear down and catch everything at first and lost a lot of fish I probably could of saved if I had acted quicker :sad:

Here's a link to my photobucket MV pic's and video http://s261.photobucket.com/albums/i...rie_Morin/BRA/

I thought it was ick, treated tank with reef-safe herbal ick medication and then it turned out it was MV and lost thousands in fish. All our favourites, including Poofie the Porcupine puffer, 2 Purple tangs etc. etc. Know for a fact that my ordeal and TomR's started with Atlantic Blue tangs.

not sure I have 180g of containers, but good idea.

Thanks Laurie. I googled velvet last night and it brought up your thread, I read it last night.
I think the drain tank idea might work if I can find enough storage....

Oh crap Brad this is terrible to read about. I understand you not wanting to rip that reef apart since it's been a raging success since startup meaning a lot of rocks are now one.

Reading this has convinved me now that a qt tank is a must. Good luck I hope you save most of them :cry:

That sucks, hope it all works out for you.
Never having had MV sorry I can't offer any advice.

Quarantine works best with new fish before adding them to the display tank and using an already set up and fully cycled QT. If you have to set up a new QT, then you will be dealing with cycle problems/risk, which will just cause more stress to your fish. And not to mention the stress of catching them and tearing apart your display tank.

So your best option at this point is probably to just feed them well, garlic, selcon, etc, and maybe try some reef safe remedies that others say have worked. And hope that your fishes' immune system kicks in and fights off the ick or velvet. Hopefully you have ick, not velvet. You may lose the new fish and the weaker ones, but hopefully your stronger long term fish will survive.

I learned my lesson with not QTing a year and half ago, and now use a QT for 2 months (hyposalinity) on any new fish. Have done that twice now, with total success.

The good news, though, when I did have my ich outbreak, is that I did not lose any of my long time fish, only the new fish that I had added. What happened, is that the new fish showed the ick symptoms, and some of the long time residents got it too. The tank went through a couple 4 or 5 day iterations, where it seemed the ick would subside, then come back. The new fish got it real bad just with the 2nd iteration, and died. But the long time residents were still eating well, and didn't seem to have it as bad. They got better, and subsequent iterations showed fewer symptoms until the ick finally disappeared altogether (took about a month or so).

My theory is that the long time residents had an immune response and were better able to fight off the subsequent iterations of the disease. And when the new fish died, the disease didn't have easy to affect hosts to keep the cycle going.

I know the tank is ick free now, because I have since added new fish several times after quarantining them, with no recurrence of the disease. I should mention that I had a wait time of over 6 months before adding new fish to the display tank after my initial episode.

If your tank is 180g, it would be a lot less in saltwater if you count for the rock and coral volume. Hope everything works out...

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Ya, but with sump, it goes back up to 180. But, I might have enough. My frag tank is 90 and I have 90 sump outside. Hopefully it holds water :)

no, this isn't ich. Feeding isn't going to do anything, the first one that I lost was eating like a pig 12 hours earlier, even eating bits of the fresh garlic. While I'm a proponent of that method with ich, this isn't the same.

OK, very sorry to hear that. I feel your pain. Wish you the best.

Well, it looks like I might have enough room to drain the tank and a fast pump to fill it. That's the plan.

I now need ideas on treatment tank setup. Using water from the main tank, so good for a few days. Not sure if I should skim with copper meds? Not sure I have a skimmer. No seeded rock to sacrifice, although copper binds with carbonates, so not a good plan anyway. I can buy salt and do water changes every 4 or 5 days. Will that work?

Damn Bradd, i am so sorry to hear that! I know exactly how you feel right now' just went through the same thing, hardest thing was watching my 7 years old yellow tang go and the 300 dollars Achilles. Funny i also added the last fish few month back and the only reason I think what made mv act up was stress which was brought on by WWIII between the tangs. Anyways it wiped out the whole tank except for my mystery and cleaner wrasse.

If you need containers to drain your tank, I have a 150 gallons rubber maid you can borrow if you wanna come over to the mainland or you can go get those 44 gallons tuff containers from hd. If you use them to only hold water and nothing else there is a good chance you can clean them up afterwards and return it. I have done it once out of desperation. 50 buck per 44 gallons container isn't exactly cheap. Do you have uv by chance. I would run that in the tank and a filter sock to kill off the rest of it in the tank. How many residents you got in your tank right now? I think you need to weight out the which is more important, the fish or the coral. I wouldnt risk losing any of your sps colonies if you only have a few fish in the tank as cruel as it sounds.

Anyways Bradd, I wish best of luck! If I can do anything for please do not hesitate to ask.

Call progressive and see if he's got any treatment tank setup? I know a few lfs in town that will quarantine and treat sick fish for me.

Sorry to hear about that Brad.
Life cycle of Marine velvet is very similar to marine ich where they can multiply by numbers with day goes by. So you may not see the symptom for days (or weeks) and then bam!
I would suggest giving the fish a freshwater dip after you go them out. And give them a formalin bath after that. After that, put them into a QT and treat any secondary infections.
I hate to be pessimistic but if you see sign of marine velvet, most of time it's too late. Hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
Good luck.

They don't, the tanks in the back were shut down for maintenance. I should be ok here, just gotta figure out how to run the treatment tank without killing them.
Got enough storage I think, but I have a 125g sump under my stairs, if I have to, I'll figure out how to get it out of there.

Ya, agreed. My queen and naso still look good, as do some of the smaller fish. If I get this done today, I should be able to save them.

From what I remember the velvet can be floating in the water (like ich) so I would use new SW.

What I did (major PITA but it worked) was set up a 110g QT tank with new SW and I did a 50% water change every other day so ammonia would not build up, and treated with cuppermine (sp?) for 2 weeks. During the copper treatment I bought 80 pounds of cured LR from a tank shut down and set up a 90ish gallon rubbermaid. Transferred all my fish (only 8 left out of 34) after treatment into the rubbermaid (did weekly w/c) and kept them there for 6 weeks. They were out of the display for 8 weeks total then I slowly added them back into the display after that. Ran only heaters and powerheads in QT and the rubbermaid.

I used PVC pipes for hiding spots in the QT and followed the instructions on the cuppermine bottle for treatment

That's correct. marine velvet just like marine ich has a free floating stage. Don't use old water.