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Karma bites back - Uronema on my Pictilis Anthias

mattcoug

mattcoug

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I took great advantage of a Thanksgiving sale to pick up a bunch of Pictilis Anthias for a really great price - 60% off normal! It might cost me more in the end.

I ordered 5 females and 1 male. One of the females was DOA, less than 24 hours in the bag. Sounds suspicious.

A couple of the fish has some scuff marks on them - looks like they had some fights before getting shipped out? Sounds suspicious.

These suspicions made me decide to do CP treatment in QT rather than TTM or Copper.

I moved them into a brute can with an airstone with the shipping water, and dosed prime to bind to ammonia. I then adjusted the 40G QT tank to match salinity(1.018??) and temp.

I then dosed formalin and let the fish stew for 10 minutes before carefully moving each to the QT tank.

One female, with a red mark, then looked like she would die within a couple minutes. She was laying upside down, and barely breathing. I thought I killed her with 10 min of formalin. A couple hours later she was swimming around like nothing happened.. Yay!

That was ~68 hours ago. 48 hours ago, I dosed CP at 30mg/gal.

5 hours ago I saw the male was hiding in a PVC pipe - so cute, except he was floating upside down. Ops, well I carefully took him out and put him in a bucket. I gave him Methylene Blue and a 30 min Formalin dip, then gave him a fresh bucket of clean water. He was almost fully recovered. Yay!

I then cought and thoroughly examined each of the remaining four females. One looks clean, two have additional discolored patches, and the fish that had the red mark from the start, now has an obvious full-blown Uronema infection with one side looking almost fully dissolved.

Good thing I am alone in the house today - I almost became international with the amount of French/sic coming out of my mouth.

I have now upped the dose of CP to 80mg/gal and added in 25mg/gal of metro. The male is still separated but with the same dosage plus 1ml/gallon methylene blue.

I thought my problem would be getting them to eat, but it now looks like my problem is to not let them get eaten.

I'll include some photos so you can join the pity party.

What am I thankful for this thanksgiving? I learned my lesson in the past, so these fish were fully QT from all my established tanks/equipment.

~68 hours ago - see the red freckle/mark
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2015-11-24 20.50.40.jpg


2 hours ago -
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2015-11-27 16.26.11.jpg



Oddly enough, this girl is still swimming around like nothing happened. She might be dead tonight.


Stay safe folks, QT your fish!

-Matt
 
Enderturtle said:
Look like tiger slashes on the body.

Wow good luck. Hope your fish pull through.
Click to expand...

They do look to be vertical lines. I wonder if this fish got scratched with a net when it was being cought in the wholesalers tank.

No new fish deaths yet, so looks like the 80mg/gal cp + 25 mg/gal metro is helping.
 
I'm glad you've been able to aggressively medicate these guys and maybe turn the tide on their illness, but I've seen so many bad experiences buying fish online I won't do it again because of experiences like this.
 
My early optimism just went pop :( 2 fish died in the past 2 hours even though they didn't look worse on the outside. I am not sure the medicine is getting inside their bodies, so for all the fish that were already infected internally, I don't know if I can save them. And now, even if any of these fish pull though, I am not sure I will ever trust to put them into my display. I am also will bleach everything I touched in the past week, just to feel safe that I killed it all.

On a better note, in the same order I got a little dottyback from DD - this fish is going though TTM with no signs of illness.

Here is one of the females that just died.
2015-11-28 17.42.07.jpg
 
Where was it that you bought them from. I want to steer clear of that place.

I've only ordered from liveaquaria and only once, but had a pretty good experience. Shipping is just so expensive on top of the cost of the live stock.
 
Alot of the times, you can have local fish stores order fish for you.

if you're into rare/exotic fish just ask your local fish store if they can order it for you.

Sometimes localfishstores don't regularly keep rare/exotic fish because they don't want to be stuck with a 100$ fish which only a small percentage of people want. Their goal is to get fish in and sell them as fast as possible.

Lneatus wrasse, deepwater anthias, ? Not something they want to regularly stock up on. Special order? Sure.

Is it gonna be more expensive than bluezoo aquatics? Maybe. But include the 50$ shipping into the price of the fish. You do know online vendors will display a cheaper price because they know you have to pay for shipping or buy enough to get free shipping.


Almost any fish you see online can be purchased at a local fish store. At the fish store, you can see in person if your fish will come with the right number of eyeballs and cuts on the body before you buy it.
 
Same, my recent dd purchase is heathy as can be. They also quickly honor the 14 day guarantee, no questions asked, so in some sense, this quick killing wipeout is better off for me. But it still sucks losing fish like this.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
I had a recent horrible experience with divers den, almost wiped out our entire tank last year. I will never order from an online vendor again.
 
1 female is still alive and kicking with no sign of infection so far, and still in the same QT tank. I am hoping the metro killed off the buggers before it got to her.
 
Well an update is in order - I have two living females. One was the smallest from the original shipment- and the second is a replacement I got shipped to me right away for the original first doa. I kept the replacement in a dipping bucket(heater, airstone, 99%water change daily with cp, metro, kanamycin, prime)-never dipped in formaldehyde. Today I dripped the replacement (while dipping in paraguard) and put into the same qt, with a 90% water change.

They are both eating a mix of mysis and roe eggs.

I've had the fist one for 19 days and the second for 12.

I will get a replacement for two more females and add them to the collection after >10 days in individual buckets.



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
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