Fish undergoing treatment, please advise

Tikosyn · Nov 13, 2018

Phew, well this is a long story but here goes. My display tank has been undergoing treatment with chloroquine phosphate since October 6th for velvet. On October 27th I decided after 3 weeks of treatment to remove the meds from the tank due to the fish looking lethargic, appetite being suppressed and feeling like 3 weeks was enough. Well I started to notice some symptoms of velvet again after running carbon/doing water changes, so I immediately re-dosed the tank up to therapeutic levels on 10/28.

I am using ebay bought CP so I have re-dosed the full dosage every 5 days, with the 4th re-dose of medication yesterday. I have not seen any spots at all on any fish, but everyone is very lethargic, with some fish not really eating at all. I have not noticed any new algae growth, so I do not believe I have been under therapeutic levels of CP during this entire treatment period (since 10/28). Whereas the first treatment period I did notice new algae growth which I am guessing means CP levels dropped too low, I was not re-dosing every 5 days as I have this time.

My question is, if my fish had velvet would some of them show spots? I have been inspecting daily and have not seen any, but I do see a lot of lethargy/hiding. This may be due to the meds but also because I have the lights off this time which may be causing the fish to hide more. I am also treating with kanaplex because one fish does have somewhat torn fins. Thanks for any advice.

HotRocks · Nov 13, 2018

There are so many variables here that make this a difficult situation.

1) using CP in a DT is about impossible to know what kind of degradation you are encountering. I don't know if using algae as a guage is sufficient.
I understand you are redosing. The problem is there is no way to measure the concentration. So are your fish lethargic because they are overdosed? Are they lethargic because degradation is keeping the level sub-therapeutic and still afflicted with velvet?

2) eBay CP is unreliable because purity is not known. You are already aiming in the dark using in DT. Now if purity is lower than stated now what?

So to answer your question, it sounds like the fish still have symptoms of velvet. Velvet can most definitely be present without external symptoms "white spots". So the question is are the behavioral symptoms from velvet or an overdose?

Tikosyn · Nov 13, 2018

Exactly...I am considering running CP treatment through Sunday then running carbon and waiting it out to see what happens. I don't know what else to do at this point, which is the same thing I did the last go around. Is 3 weeks in CP enough to eradicate velvet? I cannot believe I am having this hard of a time eliminating it. I know everyone is going to say drain the tank and remove the fish, but I already have so much invested at this point, killed all my inverts, basically destroyed my tank, just to avoid that.

HotRocks · Nov 13, 2018

You will need to run for a full 30 days.

I would of course suggest moving all fish to a QT and treating them with copper. Copper because using copper power and the Hanna checker it is very easy to monitor the level.