Rant about ich and other parasites.. if I may

[ScottR]

I've been seeing tons of posts recently about ich, velvet and other diseases. Seems to primarily affect tangs on this forum.

About 20 years ago when I was in high school, my friends and I all had saltwater tanks. We simply took water and rocks from the ocean. Added to our tanks and manually topped off our water as it evaporated. We’d get fresh ocean water to do WC.

We also took fish from the ocean to put in our tanks. So we were running FOWLR. Never visited a LFS unless to buy food and supplies.

We were successful in keeping these fish for years without any disease or problems. Fast forward 20 years and you buy a fish from your LFS and you immediately have to QT it. Perhaps copper it. It’s crazy and frustrating.

Now, what the point I’m making is the fish we are getting - even if originally from the ocean and exchanged hands many times - is, they are weak. Weak immune systems. Dirty water. Just not handled properly and with care. I’m not suggesting go diving and get your own fish or anything but perhaps the system needs to change. Whether it be on our own tanks, suppliers, LFS.

With my tank, I am running fallow. I seeded my tank with ocean water, small rocks from the ocean (I don’t want to rob the ocean anymore), and am running it just to see what will happen. I have LR purchased from LFS and have mostly LPS in it. I plan to get fish and skip QT and see what happens. If there’s any interest, I’ll update this post later.

 

[Mjrenz]

What's probably the biggest threat is how parasites and diseases have evolved to become more resistant to the treatments we use. Practices such as treating with non therapeutic levels of copper just to keep parasites at bay and not eradicate them from our systems have made them a much greater problem then they used to be

 

[Halal Hotdog]

I don't feel the parasites are more immune to treatment, it's just there are more parasites than prior. 20 years ago I didn't QT a single fish and everything was fine. Now a days I QT every fish because I have seen parasites on almost every order I have placed. I feel the issue is at the wholesale level, with fish staying in infected tanks.

 

[DC504]

Seems logical to me. I'm new to saltwater, but have kept fish and have been a pet lover my entire life. I'm sure the current system is inherently injecting problems to some extent. On the other end of the spectrum, I wonder if prophylactic / over-treatment of disease is also causing problems. It's a known fact that we have created super strains of bacteria and other resistant organisms through the over-prescription of antibiotics. I feel that germaphobs probably do themselves a disservice by being "overly diligent" in their cleanliness. Some exposure is a good thing and helps build strong immune systems (It's why I made my kids play in the dirt, lol). I wonder how much, if any, of this applies to the fish trade?

Anyways, following...

 

[Mjrenz]

I don't feel the parasites are more immune to treatment, it's just there are more parasites than prior. 20 years ago I didn't QT a single fish and everything was fine. Now a days I QT every fish because I have seen parasites on almost every order I have placed. I feel the issue is at the wholesale level, with fish staying in infected tanks.

They actually are more resistant, I am treating a blue tang right now for flukes that were unaffected by two treatments of praziquantel and another member lost a fish to velvet that survived 1.75ppm of copper. I do agree that the problem stems from the wholesalers however

 

[Hermie]

Thing that irks me is the LFS will buy 6 Mandarins knowing that 3 of them will die at the store but they won't reduce the price for a half-dead Mandarin. So basically they are contributing to fish deaths and passing that cost onto the customer. It's frustrating.

 

[ScottR]

Thing that irks me is the LFS will buy 6 Mandarins knowing that 3 of them will die at the store but they won't reduce the price for a half-dead Mandarin. So basically they are contributing to fish deaths and passing that cost onto the customer. It's frustrating.

I get frustrated seeing mandarins kept in BB tanks, nudibranchs kept in small acrylic hang-on boxes, foot long fish kept in 10g holding cells and so forth. But to buy a fish knowing that it’s going to have to be quarantined is even more so frustrating. You can have a 300g tank with 50 fish, add one tang and crash your whole tank. This hobby has ways to improve.

 

[ChrisRD]

I started my first saltwater tank in 1991 and back then none of the folks I knew in the hobby QTed anything. There was a good LFS that would "hold for observation" for a week before they put stock out for sale. If you bought from them and the fish was still looking good at the 1 week mark it was rare to have a disease related issue.

These days it seems to be the opposite...seems very hit/miss and sometimes even with QT stuff can get through unless you're very diligent and treating for stuff prophylacticaly. A few years ago a vendor sent me someone else's order. I had no QT up and running (did not order any fish..wasn't expecting any). It was a small Atlantic Blue tang and I didn't want to see it perish so I just added to the system in hopes that I could just hold it for a couple of weeks until I found it a new home. I had someone lined up to take it but I started seeing itching behavior and labored breathing on all of my fish a couple of weeks later...within a couple of days lost everything in a very rapid velvet outbreak. My first time ever experiencing anything like that since I started in 1991. Needless to say everything I acquired from there forward goes through a full QT process.

I don't claim to know the reasons (a stressful chain of custody at the collection & wholesale level with compromised water parameters, suppressed immune systems and resident parasite infections seems a plausible explanation)...but definitely notice the same trend as the OP mentions.

 

[ScottR]

I started my first saltwater tank in 1991 and back then none of the folks I knew in the hobby QTed anything. There was a good LFS that would "hold for observation" for a week before they put stock out for sale. If you bought from them and the fish was still looking good at the 1 week mark it was rare to have a disease related issue.

These days it seems to be the opposite...seems very hit/miss and sometimes even with QT stuff can get through unless you're very diligent and treating for stuff prophylacticaly. A few years ago a vendor sent me someone else's order. I had no QT up and running (did not order any fish..wasn't expecting any). It was a small Atlantic Blue tang and I didn't want to see it perish so I just added to the system in hopes that I could just hold it for a couple of weeks until I found it a new home. I had someone lined up to take it but I started seeing itching behavior and labored breathing on all of my fish a couple of weeks later...within a couple of days lost everything in a very rapid velvet outbreak. My first time ever experiencing anything like that since I started in 1991. Needless to say everything I acquired from there forward goes through a full QT process.

I don't claim to know the reasons (a stressful chain of custody at the collection & wholesale level with compromised water parameters, suppressed immune systems and resident parasite infections seems a plausible explanation)...but definitely notice the same trend as the OP mentions.

Sounds like that vendor purposely sent you a diseased fish.... sad.

 

[Dkeller_nc]

There are reasons for your observations, and your observations aren't wrong. I've been in the hobby 30 years, and you're correct that S.W. fish from the 1990's generally had far less incoming disease issues. Unfortunately, however, cyanide-caught fish were far more common in that era.

The main issue is that the SW fish trade has been consolidated; in the US at least, there are only a few wholesale distributors. And customers (whether LFS or the end customer) put constant downward pressure on prices. That leads the sources that wholesalers deal with to ship more fish in less water, which leads to considerable stress and mortality. And because the wholesaling business is consolidated, more fish are being run through a given facility, and most of these do not quarantine new arrivals, again because of cost considerations. Instead, they rely on lower salinity and UV sterilization to hold parasites like cryptocaryon in check. Unfortunately, however, these measures aren't all that effective at preventing transmission at a low level to healthy stock, so almost all fish that come from these wholesalers will have some parasite load, and when the fish are placed in hobbyist's tanks at normal salinity, the parasite population explodes. Moreover, I get the strong impression that these distributors don't feed the fish all that much, since they may ship them out on demand and don't want to take the risk that a newly fed fish will contaminate the shipping water (which is much reduced to save on shipping cost).

There are solutions; my LFS owner doesn't buy from wholesalers. He instead gets the fish shipped directly from the source collectors, water changed at port of entry by a contractor, and has 1 fish shipped in a large bag of water. The fish don't stay in a wholesaler's tanks for weeks, the ammonia buildup in the shipping bag is minimal because of the large volume to fish ratio, and the fish generally don't get exposed to a high parasite load. This results in a per-animal price that's somewhere between 50% to double what the usual retail price is from 'net and less-well-run LFSs.

As you might imagine, I gladly pay it; all of the fish in my systems came from his shop. Probably most importantly, I never complain about the cost of fish and/or corals in forums, because if enough people do that, it has the effect of putting pressure on wholesalers and retailers to cut corners to reduce the retail price.

 

[whitesand]

Same same fish now are not hardy like 20 years ago. If it helps I float garlic in tank when adding new fish and I soak food in garlic. Every fish I add gets sick, the fish already in tank don't get sick. Most make it some don't. Tangs nowadays don't do it. It seems they are full of yuck. Maybe if we get away from buying them the bread stock will get hardier.

 

[ScottR]

There are reasons for your observations, and your observations aren't wrong. I've been in the hobby 30 years, and you're correct that S.W. fish from the 1990's generally had far less incoming disease issues. Unfortunately, however, cyanide-caught fish were far more common in that era.

The main issue is that the SW fish trade has been consolidated; in the US at least, there are only a few wholesale distributors. And customers (whether LFS or the end customer) put constant downward pressure on prices. That leads the sources that wholesalers deal with to ship more fish in less water, which leads to considerable stress and mortality. And because the wholesaling business is consolidated, more fish are being run through a given facility, and most of these do not quarantine new arrivals, again because of cost considerations. Instead, they rely on lower salinity and UV sterilization to hold parasites like cryptocaryon in check. Unfortunately, however, these measures aren't all that effective at preventing transmission at a low level to healthy stock, so almost all fish that come from these wholesalers will have some parasite load, and when the fish are placed in hobbyist's tanks at normal salinity, the parasite population explodes. Moreover, I get the strong impression that these distributors don't feed the fish all that much, since they may ship them out on demand and don't want to take the risk that a newly fed fish will contaminate the shipping water (which is much reduced to save on shipping cost).

There are solutions; my LFS owner doesn't buy from wholesalers. He instead gets the fish shipped directly from the source collectors, water changed at port of entry by a contractor, and has 1 fish shipped in a large bag of water. The fish don't stay in a wholesaler's tanks for weeks, the ammonia buildup in the shipping bag is minimal because of the large volume to fish ratio, and the fish generally don't get exposed to a high parasite load. This results in a per-animal price that's somewhere between 50% to double what the usual retail price is from 'net and less-well-run LFSs.

As you might imagine, I gladly pay it; all of the fish in my systems came from his shop. Probably most importantly, I never complain about the cost of fish and/or corals in forums, because if enough people do that, it has the effect of putting pressure on wholesalers and retailers to cut corners to reduce the retail price.

Thanks for the insight. I grew up in Hawaii and there was obviously never a shortage of quality fish. I moved away a few years ago and now have a harder time in this hobby.

 

[AcanthurusRex]

Wild parasites have not evolved to resist treatments; there is no feedback from the dead fish in our tanks to the ocean. The selection for hardier parasites takes place anywhere a sub-therapeutic treatment is used and the system is not routinely sterilized. The cycle ends when the fish is flushed down the toilet and the tanks are sold.

 

[bluprntguy]

Some of the problems we are seeing very well may be indicative of the fact that the health of the worlds reefs are declining, which negatively impacts the health of the fish living there. 30 years ago fish were being pulled from thriving, healthy ecosystems. Today they are being pulled from areas that have seen mass bleaching of corals and long term harvesting of rock and corals as well. The water quality is generally poorer due to our changing environment and pollution from humans. We can’t expect the fish to be healthy when they come from these types of conditions.

 

[Dkeller_nc]

Thanks for the insight. I grew up in Hawaii and there was obviously never a shortage of quality fish. I moved away a few years ago and now have a harder time in this hobby.

Sadly, that's not the case now. Even recreational fish collecting by Hawaiian residents is prohibited.