Marine aquarium parasites, choosing fish and water changes and other common questions.

White spot:

This form of parasite is extremely diverse in its variations.

Basically the adult white spot burrows into the fishes flesh and lays it’s offspring. These are the white spots on the host creature, the blisters containing offspring.

Though the white spot to some degree are not that bad as they are found in the water always. It is more so the time frame in which the infestation goes on for and the other parasites that can now attack the host as the stress levels have increased because of the original infestation. The reason parasites are able to get a hold on the host is because there was some stress in the water originally.

This causes the host fish to loose its mucus coating, as the stress will adversely affect the fish’s mucus production. Within the fishes mucus coating there is an immune system to fight off parasites and bacterial attacks to the fishes flesh between the scales.

There are many forms of treatment for these outbreaks and all affect inverts to some degree.

The first thing you should do when the spots are noticed is to stop feeding your tank inhabitants. This achieves two things. It reduces pollutants keeping PH and oxygen at beneficial levels. It also increases the fishes drive to survive as they are hungry and basic instincts come to a head and give them the will to fight off attacks and increase there mucus quality.

PH buff your tank wouldn’t hurt and if there was a reason to justify it, do a water change and then buff your tank. Remember PH affects every thing and everything affects it.

Don’t feed for around 3 days as the white spot on average has a 48-hour life span. Make sure if there was an underlying problem that caused the stress in the first place you fix it before you feed them again.

The rest of the diseases and parasites are very straightforward. The higher quality water you can provide for your tank inhabitants the less chance of these occurring.

If you keep your conditions good enough you can cure most sick fish in your water. There is one disease that can be found in some species from Vanuatu. The treatment for this is illegal in this country. It is just as well that in a healthy tank, it doesn’t spread very well.

If you keep your water assisted by a very functional dry section Keep your water stable and clean, your food bacteria free and the only fish that will still get parasite attacks is the one that will never physiologically be able to except it is not in the open ocean anymore.

Some are like this. They are parasite factories. (Always)-if something is sick in your tank; do not feed it until it is better! They are not human. We need food to get better, they do not. They’re craving for food keeps instinctive creatures will to survive, high.

When you feed your tank, the PH drops. So essentially this makes the fish feel sick, feel partly electrocuted, slightly suffocated and the chance to notice how sick they are.

Fix the problem, when the parasites seem to be nearly gone, PH buff your tank, give it an hour then start a little feeding.

Quarantining your fish in a separate tank can be an advantage, especially for that one particular fish that seems predisposed to parasites.

For a novice, combined with a new tank, a quarantine tank may be essential.

If you want to be sure as to the health of your fish before introducing it to your tank, than set up a small tank of say 2 to 3 foot by 15 by 15 inches. It doesn’t need to be a big tank. Have a small biological system running it. Especially make a dry section apart of the filter to help with PH control. There should be nothing in the tank except some hiding places. Like small pieces of PVC pipe for the quarantined fish to hide in. The reason you do not use porus material in this tank is that most good parasite cures have copper sulphate in them and it kills all inverts and adheres to any surface. So a biological filter with a quarantine tank is not greatly necessary and substrate,dead coral or rocks in the tank are more of a problem than help.

Quarantining your inverts with a good bio filter is a good idea as well, as they can introduce mantis shrimp, flat worms, nudibranchs and so on.

Probably the best way in which to quarantine your inhabitants and all of us marine keepers would find this a huge advantage, is to use plastic tubs and pump the water up to your filter than overflow to the tub, this area called quarantine does not have to be pretty, it needs to be separate to your display tank and it’s system and just work well.

Have one for fish and a larger one for inverts. Have a couple of good t8s over your invert tub to sustain them for the short term and a basic weak light for the fish tub.

Follow the instructions on the cure you purchase and monitor with testing for levels of the cure.

The wrong amounts of the treatment you use will either adversely affect your fish or kill them.

Remember white spot is an invert and the treatment you will most likely be using is a invert killer.

Do not use treatments on inverts at all!

Selecting a healthy fish

When purchasing a fish they will show you if they are healthy or not by the colour and personality.

If they are a strong colour and looking for food aggressively, acting territorial, not hiding much and even keen to look at you and have you go away, this is the one you get.

Most fish can be nitrate poisoned before you buy them, or stress poisoned. This means they have had continued adrenalin produced and it damages organs beyond repair as does nitrate poisoning. So they eat and eat, but still eventually die as if drug caught.

Chaetodons and centropyges are easy to see if they are sick. If their colour is not a dark one and there can be seen a darkening around the gill area, this is not a good fish to get, it may have already gone to far to save.

Water changes.

Why do we do this? What does it achieve?

There are three basic groups of gases and substances we need to remove that your filter wool, live rock or canister, etc, will not remove affectively. Liquid waste, nitrate gas and phosphates-etc.

The first can be removed to 90% pure by a good protein skimmer. The next is something that a little is done by your live rock. You mainly need a large plenum style area, or is actually a clean dead spot in your water to convert this to nitrogen.

The third can only be removed via activated carbons-etc, or an algae environment. This if done large enough and light applied properly will do all water purifying to an extremely high level.

But you would need at least 20 times the your tanks diameter in size to achieve this.

So we come back to water changes.

Make what you can, build what you can. In the ocean one kilometre of reef has over a hundred kilometres of ocean to process its waste, mainly by phytoplankton.

You can have perfect pristine ocean water at home with the money and the space to achieve it.

If you wish to store your salt water, then it can be left for a week or a year it doesn’t matter. Just prevent evaporation while in storage. If an alga develops in the stored container, it doesn’t matter.

The water when used can be added directly to your tank. Your system will stabilize the new water very quickly.

If you want you can bring the temp and PH to similar levels as your tank water, though it is not necessary. A quarter to a half of your tank per week should be the maximum under normal conditions to change.

Mantis shrimp removal

With a mantis you can leave the tank for a few hours after the light goes off, then use a torch or switch on the lights and have a length of 8 mill ish dowl, if you want you can cut a slot in the dowle and insert a Stanley knife razor blade.

You then find it and hold the dowle over it and push and push on its head and it is history. It might take a few goes, but it is soon very dead. Or you can drill a fine hole in the end of the dowle push in a needle, or just force it in to it and that one works on fish you don’t need as well, with no disturbance to your live rock.

But you could use a mantis shrimp trap, sold from the shops.