Marine Velvet horribleness

[fishoholic]

Originally Posted by Piscez

First sincere condolences I've lost 7 fish recently and I know how horrible and guilty I felt, but it pales in comparison your your loses, talk about stress! I know how you feel checking each morning with a pit in your stomach. You must be devastated.... again I'm truly sorry for you, you certainly had some magnificent fish.

I'd also like to thank you for being so brave and honest to post this info, I'm sure we can all learn and take lessons from this. IMO that is what these forums are all about. Without the people on this forum I would have never been able to keep my dream of owning a SW tank.

I was wondering if you could tell us what you plan is to do with your infected tanks now? Do you completely change ALL the water, some rock? all rock?? or do you leave it fallow or ????? and for how long etc???................


Still hoping theres more to learn from all this

sincere regards

Thanks, this is why I posted everything that's happening. Well that and to keep my wonderful canreef friends up to date as to what's happening.

Anyway I figured if at least one other person could learn from my mistakes, it might save them from having to go through what I've been going through and then at least something good could come from this whole mess.

Basically the display tanks have to sit fish free for at least 6 weeks. By doing this the disease will die off due to not having a fish for it to host on. We will probably go 8 weeks just to be on the safe side. We plan on doing a 30% water change on the display tanks today (which for a 500g system is 150g, which is a lot of water to mix and change out) after that we will do regular water changes as needed.

For future preventative measures we will be QT'ing all new fish before adding them to the display.

To be honest why we didn't QT fish before, is that it is a PITA to set up a QT tank and then you have to go through the worries of ammonia spiking etc. etc. However it is much easier to deal with the death of a new QT fish then the death of pretty much all your fish.

My plan (to make QT more reasonable and more likely to happen) is to (in about 10 weeks from now) plumb in a 90g to our existing system set it up with established LR (leave it bare bottom/no sand) and have it connected through a float switch valve. This way whenever we buy a new fish we will have a fully established tank for it to go into that we can disconnect (by turning the float switch off) from the display in order to keep the display disease free.

After a few weeks in QT if the fish is healthy then we turn the float valve switch back on and we can add the new fish. If the fish isn't healthy we can remove to fish from the 90g QT put it in a smaller QT tank and do what ever treatment necessary to try to save it. We would then keep the 90g disconnected from the displays for 8 weeks allowing time for what ever disease is in there to dissipate before reconnecting the 90g back up to the display tanks.

Thus giving new healthy fish a safe place to live in before being added to the display tanks, and thus keeping the displays disease free.