Stay strong. Check water quality in the QT frequently. Get one of those SeaChem ammonia detectors. They are great for giving you a heads up on the ammonia levels in the QT.

That is really horrible. Sorry for the losses Laurie.

hey there Laurie, WOW talk about bad luck. I was skimming through the thread . get it SKIMMING :lol::lol::lol: i little joke to perk you up./. any ways i saw that you were asking about melifix i have used it when my fish were sick ,you just can't use the skimmer for a about 48 hours... but it does work thou..

Hey hows the skimmer holding up. did your friend get the beckett for ya to use... I hope today was a good day.

First sincere condolences I've lost 11 fish recently and I know how horrible and quilty 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 truely sorry for you, you certainly had some magnificent fish. :Cry:

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 :cry:

sincere regards

Thanks guys.

I am testing the ammonia daily and doing large water changes and using Amquel to help keep the ammonia levels down.

No deaths so far this morning, really hoping it stays that way.

After the copper treatment is done I plan on setting up a 90g for the remaining fish (with established live rock that we're either going to buy from a tank shut down or borrow from a friend) with the hopes of giving the remaining fish a better chance of survival for the 4-6 weeks we will be leaving them out of the display for.

Just wondering do wrasse's have some sort of odd immune system that keeps them disease free? All of my large wrasse's and my cleaner wrasse have not shown any signs or symptoms of velvet. My CBB seems unaffected as well (hoping & praying they all stay that way) it just seems really weird.

My Solar & six line survived my mystery illness too along with my foxface, but I lost 4 clowns, 3 gobies, 1 flame angel, 1 hippo tank, 1 Royal gramma, and 1 firefish.

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.

Sorry to hear that it really sucks loosing fish. Funny though how wrasse's seem to pull through.

So melifix works for SW fish too and is safe to use with LR in the tank? Right? If the sohal survives the copper treatment he will go to the 90g holding tank which will be set up with LR (established live rock but not LR from my tanks) and that is when I was thinking of treating him with melifix.

Skimmer is working good still and since I have much less of a bio-load now I'm guessing I wont have to worry about high nitrates. At least not anytime soon anyways.

It is good to see that you have decided to set up a QT and are recommending it to others.
I have a few other recommendations.
In the ensuing weeks, plan your tank. The regular visit you and your hubby make to the LFS returning with several fish should be a thing of the past.

Avoid difficult to keep species like Achilles tangs. There is a reason that fish like the achilles have been flagged red by most authors and experienced reefers. Sure, a few of them survive but most perish for no apparent reason and take their tank mates with them.

If your are going to start adding fish to your main tank in a couple of months choose a couple of hardy fish and observe them for several weeks. Only than start slowly adding some of the species your are more fond of to ensure that the disease cased by the stress in your previous tank does not resurface.

Best Wishes. I know what you have gone through.