New spots on my hippo tang?

[drknudsenx2]

Diagnosed the tank with ich last week, but when I came home all of the white spots were gone from all fish and all fish acting normal (so less than 24 hours of white spots on fish?)
All fish have been acting normally, and blue tang was normal this morning. Came home from work and larger circumscribed lesions on Face. Have not noticed any scratching behaviors, but she does wiggle between the rock work. What horrible contagion does she have now?

 

[Jay Hemdal Verified Community Expert]

Hi - the pics are just not quite clear enough for me to hazard a guess. It is very common for Cryptocaryon (ich) to drop off the fish in unison when it first gets started. Then, as the infection gets more severe, they become out of sync and you start seeing spots all of the time. That said, you already saw what ich looks like and this looks different to you....you could be seeing the next wave if ich trophonts coming onto the fish. It doesn't look like head and lateral line erosion. It could be bacterial, or even flukes, or it could just be normal variability in color of the fish.

Some follow up questions:

How long have you had the tang?
What other fish are in the tank?
Invertebrates?
Did you run them through quarantine?
Does the water check out o.k.?

Jay

 

[drknudsenx2]

 

[MetaKnight101]

It could be flukes, I suggest you do a freshwater dip to rule out the possibility for flukes. Also, if you diagnosed your tank with ich you need to quarantine all your fish because ich is still there and you need to leave your tank fallow for 76 days

Here's a great video on how to do a dip

 

[drknudsenx2]

I am having such a difficult time getting a video to upload. Yes these lesions are about 4x larger than the ich lesions we diagnosed. They were not quarantined, I have a yellow tang, 2 clowns, 2 fire gobies, a peppermint shrimp and banded shrimp, and various snails and hermit crabs. Water parameters are all stable

 

[Jay Hemdal Verified Community Expert]

It could be flukes, I suggest you do a freshwater dip to rule out the possibility for flukes. Also, if you diagnosed your tank with ich you need to quarantine all your fish because ich is still there and you need to leave your tank fallow for 76 days

Here's a great video on how to do a dip

Some improvements to that procedure: avoid the aeration, the fish don't need it for a five minute dip and if the air is up too high like in this case, they get blown around. Also, you don't need to use RO/DI water, I use dechlorinated tap water. I imagine they did this for the video, but NEVER dip a fish in a clear container under tank lights!

That fish had a severe Neobenedenia infestation - much worse than that, and the fish could actually bleed out when all the flukes drop off. When I see hundreds of Neo lifting up off a fish, I wait for about half of them to drop, then I return the fish to the tank and dip it again in two days - giving time for its skin to heal where the first flukes had been attached.

Jay