Bacterial infections, help me understand

[Wildreefs]

looking to further understand the nature of bacterial infections.

In my fowlr (at the moment ) tank, I am running 1.75 copper. I lost about 6 fish this week, and the bulk of them had ragged fins, weird discoloring on the body, and one Pygmy angel had 1 cloudy eye.

On Tuesday I dosed the tank with prazi, 5 ml per 20 gallons of water.

Fish that were at lfs for quite some time eating, came into my tank eating, and shortly after became ugly with the symptoms, and died days later.


Fish that died were flameback angel, juvenile ramp angel, 3 different anthias, and a rhomboid wrasse.

Fish still alive are a flame wrasse, Xmas wrasse, exquisite wrasse, onyx clown and hawk fish.

Zero ammonia or nitrite, 10 percent water changes done every 5 days, 200 micron sock.

I don’t believe my water is bad, may not be sps ready, but certainly not bad.

What generally causes these infections?

And the worst seem to come of it after prazi dose.

 

[HotRocks]

Is your water cloudy at all from combining prazi and copper?

 

[Wildreefs]

Small bloom that I’ve always gotten from prazi pro, even when used by itself.

Same look I see at lfs when they dose it .

 

[ngoodermuth]

Are you running your skimmer with the cup off when treating with prazi? This is pretty important when treating a display, due to the higher oxygen requirements.

 

[ngoodermuth]

How long has the copper been running?

If you think they are suffering from secondary bacterial infections (I’m assuming that you are running copper for parasites), then they really need antibiotics... preferably in QT.

Depending on how long they have been in copper so far, would make a difference in whether or not it should probably be continued in QT as well. I’d say if it’s been at least 7-10 days you could probably just go without copper and give the antibiotics a shot. Start the copper again if symptoms crop back up. But, antibiotics work better without copper.

Then, remove the copper in your display and just let it go fallow. That’s my best suggestion.

If you’d prefer not to move them to QT(I know you’ve expressed reservations about QT) you can catch whoever you can (or looks the worst) for a 90-minute bath in acriflavine; and then soak vitamins, kanaplex, and focus to food and hope they can get ahead of it that way.

 

[Wildreefs]

How long has the copper been running?

If you think they are suffering from secondary bacterial infections (I’m assuming that you are running copper for parasites), then they really need antibiotics... preferably in QT.

Depending on how long they have been in copper so far, would make a difference in whether or not it should probably be continued in QT as well. I’d say if it’s been at least 7-10 days you could probably just go without copper and give the antibiotics a shot. Start the copper again if symptoms crop back up. But, antibiotics work better without copper.

Then, remove the copper in your display and just let it go fallow. That’s my best suggestion.

If you’d prefer not to move them to QT(I know you’ve expressed reservations about QT) you can catch whoever you can (or looks the worst) for a 90-minute bath in acriflavine; and then soak vitamins, kanaplex, and focus to food and hope they can get ahead of it that way.

Thank you so much for the reply. My reservation about all this is I’ve been down this lane before, and before I considered it, would like to know what is causing it.

The skimmer was off, however I did have two air pumps running in the sump. What is causing these ragged fin in first place.


I removed the dead fish today, and dipped them in freshwater for 10 minutes, didn’t see anything fall off fluke wise .

 

[ngoodermuth]

Can you post any photos of what you are seeing? Might be helpful in getting a positive ID