It was a bit of a roller coaster, but all three of my new fish made it out of QT and into the DT! I was expecting some rough handling by my clownfish of the newcomers, but she’s been surprisingly tame. I expected her to bully the smaller of the two fish (the corris wrasse and the watchman goby), but surprisingly she’s been chasing the firefish off. The fish were moved into the DT 9 days ago and I’m happy to report everyone is behaving themselves.
This picture is pretty terrible (taken with an iPhone 6S), but you can see the firefish and wrasse here. The yellow watchman has set himself up a nice spot in the front of the tank (AWESOME!). I’ll snap some good pictures of them and post later.
On 2/23 my three new fish successfully transitioned from the hospital tank into observation! This is only the second time I’ve quarantined fish and only the first time I’ve gotten fish to this stage. The last group of fish had velvet and then uronema and ultimately died when I forgot to turn a pump back on after feeding. These three came through without a hitch. I had a few days when ammonia crept up, but a 10% water change took care of the problem.
The picture above is the observation tank. It is a simple 10 gallon tank with a steel stand from a big box store. I’m using a hang-on-back power filter with a pre-seeded sponge from my DT and a Koralia K2 for flow. I built a heater controller from an Inkbird ITC1000 that I got cheap on Amazon. (I’ll post a link to my DIY on that here after I post it)
Sorry the picture above is a little dark, but this is right after moving the fish over to the observation tank. The yellow watchman goby is there too, but he likes to hide under that piece of PVC on the left. The fish came out to eat thirty minutes after I moved them. Everything seemed to be going perfectly, until….
I noticed a fuzzy white patch on the firefish’s tail. DANG IT! It looked a lot like the infection my clownfish had not too long ago. Lucky for me I had Kanaplex on hand already and started dosing it right away. This is why we do observation after QT! It isn’t uncommon for fish to come through copper and wind up with a secondary skin infection. Treatment in observation is super easy, but it would have been a pain if they were already in the DT.
It’s a little hard to see, but watch the firefish’s tail in this video and you can see the white spots flash on his tail.
The last thing I found out I did wrong was the prazipro treatment. There’s a calculator that tells you dosage intervals and I didn’t know that. I just followed the plan of dose, waiting 72 hours, dose again, wait 72 hours and do a water change. Apparently I was supposed to dose and then dose again after 6-8, then repeat.
^– That’s what the calculator outputs. I’m going to dose Kanaplex two more times, two days apart. Then I’ll run carbon for 24 hours and redo the prazi treatment.
It took 20 doses at 0.75mL, but I’m finally at 2.5ppm copper in the quarantine tank. The fish don’t seem stressed at all. Everyone is eating fine and acting normally. I am noticing Ammonia is starting to creep up. That’s expected with the high copper levels. I did a 10% water change today with water already at 2.5ppm copper. I’ll probably do another one tomorrow with the same to try and get the levels down.
The plan is to keep the fish in here at this level for 14 days. On February 23 they will get transferred in to a sterile QT with completely separate equipment and with no copper. This is sort of a hybrid between the Tank Transfer Method and straight copper treatment. If you keep them at therapeutic levels for 14 days and then move them to a clean tank it has the same effect as TTM. The fish have no parasites on them after 14 days and none are able to get to them due to the copper. Transferring them keeps them away from the parasites.
Once they’re in the second QT, I’ll observe them for another week (maybe 2) and then they will join Jaws in the DT.
Tomorrow is the big day! Starting to run copper. I’m going to raise it up over the course of 10 days since wrasses are particularly sensitive to copper. People have found that chelated copper, like Copper Power and Copper Safe, tend to be easier on fish. The therapeutic range is also higher which means it is a bit harder to overdose. Lucky for me, it is readily available at most local fish stores. Chelated copper levels can be tested using API’s Copper test kit. It can not be tested using Seachem’s or Salifert’s.
The therapeutic level for Copper Power is 2.5ppm. Over 10 days, I’m going to raise by 0.25ppm per day. It takes 0.5 oz (according to the bottle) to reach that level in 10 gallons of water. On day 1 (tomorrow), I’m going to dose 0.025 oz (~0.75 mL) in the morning and again in the afternoon. I’ll test after the first dose and in theory, I won’t see much if anything detectable on the test kit. Repeat for the next 9 days and I should get to 2.5ppm. I have sand in there for the wrasse, so this might take more than expected to reach therapeutic levels. It also might get absorbed, so daily testing for 30 days is a must.
All of my new fish friends have settled into quarantine just fine. The wrasse still seems content to sleep under some bioballs at night instead of in the nice bowl of sand I made a special trip to the store to buy for him that he just ignores… ARG! The watchman goby spends all day and night between those same bioballs but pokes out and keeps an eye on things during the day. The firefish is always out and about, but sleeps under one of the PVC elbows at night.
The fish are all eating a rotating diet of mysis shrimp, spirulina brine shrimp and live black worms.
They are currently on their second round of Prazipro to prophylacticly treat for flukes or other skin borne parasites. This will continue until 1/29 when I’ll do a water change and drop in some carbon. Then on 1/30 I’ll start the slow 10 day climb to therapeutic copper levels and then a 30 day treatment there.
If all goes well, the plan is to get them into the DT between March 18 and March 25.
UPDATED: 1/17/19 I added this handy little calculator below so you don’t need to go to the original link. You can just calculate it right here! You can still grab the file for reference using the link down below.
Phosphorus to Phosphate Calculatorr
During Black Friday Bulk Reef Supply was offering all of the Hannah checkers for $35, so I grabbed the Calcium, Alkalinity, and Phosphorus Ultra-low Range (ULR) checkers. I’ll take the time to do a write up on each of them eventually, but for now I wanted to make a quick note about how to make sense of the results from the Phosphate ULR checker.
The reading you get from the checker is parts per billion (ppb) of phosphate, not phosphorus parts per million (ppm). Conveniently enough for us, there’s an easy way to go from phosphorus (ppb) to phosphate (ppm). ..
Multiply phosphorus (ppb) by 3.066 then divide by 1000 to equal phosphate (ppm). Hannah also provides this handy look up table.
That turned into quite an adventure to get these fish and snails here! After an initial delay from last week due to poor weather in Kentucky, the next delivery date was shipping Monday with delivery Tuesday. The weather didn’t look great at the time, but I had until 10:30A on Monday to decide if I wanted to delay again.
It turned out the weather showed no precipitation and the daytime high was in the 40’s. I called anyway just to make sure that was OK because the overnight temps were in the 20’s. Apparently, they have systems in place to enable them to ship down to -20F. Holy cow! Needless to say, they saw no reason to delay due to temperature and they didn’t see any reason that we needed to hold off on the delivery. “Ship it!”
Tuesday morning rolls around and I wake up to check the UPS tracking data. Both shipments (one from ORA in FL and one from LA in CA) arrived in Kentucky and were on the plane bound for Philadelphia. This was at 5:30A and I thought it was odd the plane hadn’t left yet, but whatever… I should have trusted my intuition. I looked outside and we got a surprise dusting of snow.. It was maybe 1/4″ so I figured it would be fine. As luck would have it, the plane got delayed in Kentucky. It eventually left, but didn’t get to Philadelphia until almost 8:00A. “OK,” I thought, “It just needs to get to West Chester and then onto a truck to get to me, should be fine.” I got an email during this time from UPS saying my package would be delivered, but wouldn’t make the 10:30A window. Still OK, so long as they get here today…
At 9:40A both packages arrive at the West Chester sorting facility. 12:30P rolls around and they’re still showing that they are sitting there. I reach out to UPS and they say odds are they aren’t going to make it to me today. Naturally, I said I would drive the 45 minutes to the facility to get the boxes myself. I drive over there and….
“Sorry, those went out for delivery on the regular truck. He should be there in about 45 minutes.” ARGGHHHH!!! I speed home and… nothing. 4:30P rolls around and the driver still isn’t here. He’s normally here well before then, so I call to make sure I didn’t miss him. Long story short… he showed up 20 minutes later and apologized for all of the runaround.
I was freaking out that everything was going to be dead. To my surprise, everything was warm and still alive! I floated the fish for 20 minutes to temperature acclimate them. I tested the water, expecting salinity to be 1.023 like Live Aquaria told me. What did I find…? The bag from ORA was 1.020 and the bags from Live Aquaria were 1.022 I quickly adjusted the QT salinity and in they went.
Well so much for my first new fish getting here today… I got a call from Live Aquaria telling me they weren’t going to ship the fish out due to potential delays at UPS’s hub in Kansas City. They are going to try again for delivery on Tuesday, but we are supposed to get snow/rain Monday and Tuesday so it might not happen…
UPDATE 1/16/18: The fish have arrived! It was not without drama though more about that in another post.
I was one of the first folks on Reef2Reef to get a hold of the new EcoTech XR15 Diffuser kit and I decided to throw together a short video about my first impressions. Enjoy!
I had the best of intentions to keep this blog updated, but for so many reasons I got behind and it’s been almost a year since my last post. Things went from great to crap during the year and I started to contemplate tearing down the tank. I had a mini crash while I was away on a trip and I’m still trying to recover from it. I lost 98% of my corals, including some I didn’t get a chance to even talk about on here.
Well, it is a new year and time to get a new start. I won the Reef2Reef monthly supporter giveaway in November which is a $100 Drs Foster and Smit/Live Aquaria gift card. I decided to finally get some new fish in my tank and I placed an order which will get here on Friday!
Here is what I ordered:
Yellow Corris Wrasse
ORA Captive-bred Yellow Watchman Goby
Exquisite Firefish (more yellow in it)
I also ordered a whole bunch of snails to resupply my cleanup crew. More updates to follow!
