Prazipro & fish appetite

[asylumdown]

Well that's a major bummer. Fish didn't make it. I know moorish idols are like rainbow unicorns, but.... 6 days of being alert, interested in food, interactive, etc. it was eating handfuls of new life spectrum pellets. Dose prazipro yesterday morning, it then immediately starts refusing food, tonight as I was posting it wasn't coming up to the glass of the tank, and I just pulled its nearly dead body off the powerhead.

Gah. I'll never know if it would have died anyway, but man. This fish was doing great until I dosed. I thought to myself as I was posting earlier "that sort of looks like the thousand yard stare". I'm kicking myself for not doing a massive water change to remove the Prazi right then and there.

Perhaps a word of warning - generally considered safe, but probably best not administered to new arrivals if they're of the extremely sensitive, fickle, or skinny variety. I'm going to remove Prazi from my tank transfer protocol. It's too sensitive a time for the fish.

I just put him in a bucket of water from my display, which is medication free. He's still looking around in a rather alert manner and breathing, and he's reacting to me as I move, but he's not holding himself up (laying flat on his side). I've never seen a fish come back from this, but does anyone have any last ditch emergency suggestions?

[asylumdown]

Is it worth making up a new batch of water?

[Myka]

Interesting. Did he make the night?

You can see many threads on all sorts of sites of people using PraziPro with Moorish Idols, so I wouldn't take too much blame if I were you. PP is known to cause anorexia, so that's not a surprise. You didn't overdose though, did you?

[asylumdown]

I made 20 gallons of new water and added a much weaker pump last night. He was still technically alive this morning, but barely. I actually thought he was dead until I pulled him from the water and saw his gills were still moving slightly. I finished it with clove oil.

It could have been anything - sensitive to Prazi, damage from collection, it might have had a ton of gill flukes I never saw and the Prazi treatment knocked them off too quickly and it lost the ability to regulate some critical parameter...

It was a skinny fish, but I dunno, you start to get a sense of how a fish is doing after a while, and this one was showing all the "right" signs until Prazi. However, it will never be conclusive given these fish's reputation.

[Myka]

Bummer. Glad to hear you know about Clove Oil - most humane, easily accessible thing we have.