New stickies in the Fish Disease Forum: new treatment, etc.

[Sk8r]

I've been playing hookey a bit from the Newbie Forum trying to do some work over in Fish Disease, so that when you go there with a problem, there is a sticky that gives you a list of diseases and symptoms and recommended treatments, with notes about which species do best with what treatment.

There is also a new treatment Snorvich has a sticky for, which is the transfer method of treating external parasites such as ich, black ich, and flukes.

There are two problems we have run across, one of which was a surprise to me, but I've been at this long enough, equipment changes have happened. When we say use floss filtration on a tank, we do NOT mean the gentle limp trickle filters you're sold nowadays for biofiltration of a freshwater tank. We mean a fiercely moving Maxijet 1200 sucking water through a fistful of floss at high rates, at the bottom of a bucket, and when we say aeration, we mean either to hook a skimmer up and use its bubbles or use a POTENT airpump driving a large diffuser. Tangs and angels use a huge amount of oxygen, and a qt is usually on the small side. You MUST oxygenate especially highly for a fish that is having gill troubles, and a tang with gill troubles really needs it!

Second recommendation: hypo is a really good but often badly applied treatment. I seriously recommend if you are doing a whole-fish-list qt, you move your ATO over to the qt. Hypo will not work if you screw up the salinity or allow it to bounce around AT ALL. You have to have that salinity right, and you have to have it topped off continually to keep that salinity accurate for hypo to do its job. Otherwise you're letting the parasite have a chance of survival.

Third recommendation: we all know what floss costs. But poly fill for pillows at your friendly fabric store is 5.00 for a great big bag, and is actually more effective at holding onto crud. I use it all the time, usually for my koi pond, when I need to reduce algae. It makes a very do-able use-and-toss filter medium. And use and toss is what you want to do often, as in daily or more often, when you're trying to export ich cysts from your qt tank.

I know it's not the happiest topic, but scoot over there and give it a read. Because RC has a policy of not censoring posts even when advice is wrong, because members need to exchange [and hopefully change] their ideas---you will occasionally [often] find some really incredibly bad advice in the general posts, but what makes it into the stickies at the top of the forum has been gone over by several mods, and will be helpful to you.