Head and lateral line disease

[Paul B]

Gools that is really fantastic, as was said it is a curable disease but if you let it go to long the fish will always be scarred. I think if you keep a tang long enough they almost always get it in a small tank. Tangs are always stressed and I don't care what you do. These fish are never seen alone in the sea, if they are alone they get eaten. I have seen thousands of them while diving and they are always in schools, sometimes huge schools. thats why IMO they are suseptable to this ailment. Of course we can reduce stress but we can't eliminate it completely in a schooling fish like a tang. I also believe from observation that most fish eat baby fish as part of their diet. If you look closely while diving around rocks you will see thousands of baby fish. These are eaten by everything including tangs. Vitamin A is stored in the liver of tangs and all fish including baby fish. A tang which is mainly an algae eater gets much of this vitamin by eating fish. We as aquarists rarely feed whole fish to out fish so they lose out on this vitamin. Once a week I soak flake or freexe dried food in Vitamin "A" and feed it to my fish. I think it is one reason my moorish Idol lived so long. I would not do this every day but once a week should be enough. I also have cured fish of HLLE like this. One I especially remember was a large beautiful French Angel with a severe case of it. A French Angel is black so it looks real bad with HLLE. In a couple of months of the vitamin A he was cured, unfortunaltely he was scarred but much of the color came back and he lived to a ripe old age with no further progression of the disease. Of course as Gools said, a larger tank would help greatly.
Have a great day.
Paul