White Spots

[anthias]

hi I m sorry to wright here but I realy dont know how to open new issue.
I have a prob with my coran.B angel , every night I can see white spots over its body and fins then it desapear in the morning ,it still exist when I switch the light on in the morninig but then after a period of one hour nothing???
can any one tell me what is the case,I can tell that it is not an air pupls.

[Reefland]

Hi anthias,

I have moved your posts into it's own thread for you.

[anthias]

thanks alot 4 u .
my aqaurium is 180 gallons .

[leebca]

Sorry to hear of the trouble your fish is having.

There are several conditions which display themselves as 'white spots.' The most common is caused by the parasite called Marine Ich or technically Cryptocaryon irritans.

The white spot is the only stage in the life of the parasite that we humans can see with our naked eyes. The white spot is actually a nearly fully, or fully engorged parasite that is ready to leave the fish to multiply.

This stage of the Marine Ich likes to come off the fish at night, but it can happen at any time. Because of the 'night time preference,' most aquarists see their fish with spots on them during the day or evening time and then in the morning the spots seem to have gone away, only to show up again later.

The parasite hasn't gone away, it is just moving on to its reproductive stage so that it can continue to infect the same or other fish.

To treat Marine Ich, if this is what you think your fish has, there are three proven successful choices: hyposalinity, copper, or transfer method. To treat by any of these methods, all fish have to be moved to a hospital tank. To rid the aquarium of the disease, the aquarium must go fishless and without further contamination for at least 8 weeks (to be conservative).

It is easier to prevent the parasite from getting into your aquarium, by practicing a quarantine procedure on all livestock, before you put it into your aquarium. More info on that here:
A Fish Quarantine Process
and
An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure: A Quarantine Tank for Everything by Steven Pro - Reefkeeping.com

I hope this helps you.

[anthias]

thank u very much leebca ,my angel now looks healthy I used antiwhite spot ,in the first day the fish still has the same white spots ,second day the white spots are less ,the thired day i can see only five spots ,today my fish looks healthy and happy,(i am happy too ),but I will keep using the medicine for another 5 days cause the life circle of thge parasite is 14 days ,so i want to be sure taht my aquarium is a parasite free .
during the treatment one of the cleaners shrimps is dead ,do u think it is because of the treatment?

[leebca]

The Marine Ich (Cryptocaryon irritans) life cycle weeks/days are just averages. Some Marine Ich (MI) lifecycles take up to 7 weeks to complete. Once it was recorded that just the cyst stage took 72 days.

The data given is just averages. I hope your tank is free of the disease, whatever it was/is, but don't think it gone for at least another 7 weeks.

It's possible that the 'cure' killed the shrimp. But, I wouldn't jump to that conclusion. So much happens in home aquariums and, so much can go wrong, plus maybe it was just time for that shrimp, that without strong evidence, you don't want to take anything like that at face value.

Many 'reef safe' products have been found to kill invertebrates. There is no standard for claiming something is 'reef safe.' And, there is no realistic way that any manufacturer can test their product on every single marine life form. So they 'guess' it is 'reef safe' because it doesn't affect some of the marine life they tried it on.

If you want some good information on MI you might want to read this:
http://www.petsforum.com/personal/tr...marineich.html

Just keep in mind that when you read any literature on marine pathogens, that the days/times are averages. In the case of MI, like I wrote above, it can linger for months in the aquarium as a low-level infection waiting for a stressor to tip the fish over to being vulnerable again.

Good luck!