Yellow Tang - ich or velvet?

[YMRreefer]

Hi all, we recently added a white tail bristletooth (very early in January)... but it died Thursday night. None of the other fish were showing signs of anything up until that point. The day before the bristletooth died, we dosed the entire tank with prazipro, praying that it was flukes and not velvet or ich. Even after the bristletooth died - it didn't look like it had spots? But it was absolutely breathing hard and fast the night it died. I have attached this picture of our yellow tang- today. I am guessing it's either ich or velvet we just couldn't see it, d/t the coloring of the white tail. I appreciate the responses. I am still so shocked it came out of nowhere. This guy has been in our tank since August and we have had zero issues until the bristetooth was added... who was QT'd at our LFS for 2 months and looked great when he was first added. The addition had causes stress amongst the tangs, we also have a powder brown. Who has spots on his fins now, not on the body like the yellow tang. This hobby is hard... because this is our fist tank and we have tried to be so cautious.

 

[Big G]

QT can mean a lot of different things to different people. The only QT you can truly trust is your own. That said, because of the rapid death, I'm leaning velvet, even though the spots look more like Ich. But you treat it the same way but with a greater sense of urgency for velvet:

Fresh water dip for 3-5 minutes to rid the fish's gills of parasites so it can breath. Immediately follow with a bath.

Bath for 60-90 minutes in Ruby Reef Rally or acriflavine product. This step greatly increases survival rates even on fish heavily infested with velvet.

Then into either chelated copper (Copper Power or Coppersafe) already dosed up to 1.0 ppm. Then using regular small doses get up to therapeutic range of 2.0 within 48 hours. Or dose with CP (choroquine phosphate). This step only kills parasites in the free swimming stage. So the First two steps are very important as they remove parasites already attached to your fish.

Dose the QT with the copper or CP with an antibiotic to prevent bacterial infection which is very common due to the many insertion points of the parasites. Kanaplex is good but if you need to the Trifecta of Kanaplex + Metro + Furan2 will cover a wider spectrum of infection. Dose for 10-14 days.

 

[YMRreefer]

You have a very good point @Big G . Well, we can remove the smaller fish, but unfortunately we do not have multiple QT tanks - just one very small one we use for coral ~10 gallons. So the two tangs could no way be in that together. This will be a rush to try and find enough tanks to set up QT for these guys. I really appreciate your response.

 

[Big G]

Freshwater dips will buy you some time as they remove a tremendous amount of parasites of velvet, not so much for ich as the little buggers burrow under the fish's skin and the FW has less effect on them.