Yellow tang turning grey/white, fuzzy?

cc333 · Aug 28, 2023

Help! My yellow tang literally turned from normal to looking like this in a day. Any info on what this could be?
She had some on her fin a few weeks ago, we thought it was just sand, it went away in two days. Now it’s back even worse!! What could it be? She’s looking skinny and not wanted to eat today.

Edited to add: she’s the ONLY one effected by this. All other fish in the tank are good.

Marine Iguana · Aug 28, 2023

That is one seriously emaciated fish- has it been eating for you? Also looks to have a bad case of HLLE

cc333 · Aug 28, 2023

Marine Iguana said:
That is one seriously emaciated fish- has it been eating for you? Also looks to have a bad case of HLLE

She was eating just fine yesterday, but has refused to eat today.

cwerner · Aug 28, 2023

It looks to me like it's not been eating fine for a while. What have you been feeding her?

InactiveAcct · Aug 28, 2023

Marine Iguana said:
That is one seriously emaciated fish- has it been eating for you? Also looks to have a bad case of HLLE

Hopefully @vetteguy53081 can help out. I thought HLLE when I saw it since very common with Tangs but I feel like it usually advances much slower, never heard of overnight HLLE

InactiveAcct · Aug 28, 2023

Really need to get it eating again as well. Try caviar or other suggestions others may have

jmichaelh7 · Aug 28, 2023

Wow … no yellow tang should look that skinny

vetteguy53081 · Aug 29, 2023

cc333 said:
Help! My yellow tang literally turned from normal to looking like this in a day. Any info on what this could be?
She had some on her fin a few weeks ago, we thought it was just sand, it went away in two days. Now it’s back even worse!! What could it be? She’s looking skinny and not wanted to eat today.

Edited to add: she’s the ONLY one effected by this. All other fish in the tank are good.

Yikes. . . this poor guy. This fish has a few things going on. HLLE, yes. . . bacterial issue and also bacterial issue. At the tail appears to be skin irritation. The correlation with all these include poor water and can include elevated ammonia and/or nitrate as well as overfeeding and filtration issue but fish is quite thin .
Is fish eating?
If so, what foods have you been offering?
Concern is you stated this happened overnight. In my experience generally progressive opposed to rapid onset.
I suggest setting up a quarantine tank with fresh sterile water and treating fish with seachem Kanaplex and maintaining water quality with this new water and stepping up diet with fattener/protein such as TDO pellets, mysis shrimp, LRS Herbivore diet and small plankton as well as Nori seaweed
Two eyes are better than. . . . @Jay Hemdal - your thoughts?

52728299 · Aug 29, 2023

vetteguy53081 said:
Yikes. . . this poor guy. This fish has a few things going on. HLLE, yes. . . bacterial issue and also bacterial issue. At the tail appears to be skin irritation. The correlation with all these include poor water and can include elevated ammonia and/or nitrate as well as overfeeding and filtration issue but fish is quite thin .
Is fish eating?
If so, what foods have you been offering?
Concern is you stated this happened overnight. In my experience generally progressive opposed to rapid onset.
I suggest setting up a quarantine tank with fresh sterile water and treating fish with seachem Kanaplex and maintaining water quality with this new water and stepping up diet with fattener/protein such as TDO pellets, mysis shrimp, LRS Herbivore diet and small plankton as well as Nori seaweed
Two eyes are better than. . . . @Jay Hemdal - your thoughts?

Imo @vetteguy53081 has given you the best advice your going to find. id prolly be concerned with possible intestinal parasites and you may want to look into some Fenbendazole, especially if you've been feeding him and he's still that skinny.

littlefoxx · Aug 29, 2023

@MnFish1 might have thoughts as well

Jay Hemdal · Aug 29, 2023

cc333 said:
Help! My yellow tang literally turned from normal to looking like this in a day. Any info on what this could be?
She had some on her fin a few weeks ago, we thought it was just sand, it went away in two days. Now it’s back even worse!! What could it be? She’s looking skinny and not wanted to eat today.

Edited to add: she’s the ONLY one effected by this. All other fish in the tank are good.

Welcome to Reef2Reef

What I see, as the others have said, is that the fish is very thin and it has head and lateral line erosion (the pale white areas near the top fin). The white material on the bottom and the tail at first looked like sand stuck to the fish, but I think it may be a bacterial or fungal infection.

I'm really sorry, but there isn't anything that you can do for this fish, when fish get really thin, they use their livers for energy. Once that gets used up, they stop eating and die. That is probably the primary issue here, and then the white material was secondary to that.

You should post pictures of your other fish so that we can see if they are too thin as well.....

Jay