Or shall I title it "The Swimming Dead"...I wish I had pictures to show you what I am about to describe but the scene was so horrific that we could barely stand to look at them, let alone take pictures. We've had an entire 75g tank wipeout once due to ick (we didn't catch it in time). But this...this was not ick.
One day, John found a fellow hobbyist in our area selling some of his full grown rare Africans. He came home with two 7 stripe frontosas and a 6-7" VC-10. The moment he walked in to acclimate his new finds, he notices that something is wrong. A couple of fish had started to rot and shed flesh. This disease did not look familiar at all and it got exponentially worse by the day. Fish quickly started to literally deteriorate from the inside out. Half of them were blind due to their eyeballs melting away. He frantically searched online for answers and went out to got meds. We tried 3 different medicines, some supposedly the best on the market (also the most expensive), treated the tank for at least a couple weeks until we used up all the different types of medicines we got. We did small and large water changes, whichever the meds recommended. We tried to segregate the really bad ones to prevent the entire tank from turning inside out (literally). In the end, most all the of the OGs were gone and the new additions were also gone. What was crazy to us was the fact that most of the ones that died were the larger ones and we were left with the small and dull colored ones that didn't seem to be affected at all.
So, now that the gory part is over, one of the meds we used turns your tank ninja turtle green. No joke, neon green. Not to mention, it dyed all of our beautiful lace rock green. John read that people have bleached their lace rock to rid the color but we were too afraid that we wouldn't be able to clear all the bleach with all the natural holes and crevices in the rock. So now, we've got 50lbs of ruined lace rock just sitting there. This entire 2-3 week span was just awful. The fish we grew out along with the rare finds we JUST purchased were pretty much living dead. While we were treating, we both knew in the back of our minds that even if we got rid of the disease, there was no way the fish could reverse their conditions.
Whether you're a fan of fish keeping or not, everyone who encounters a tank no matter the size always stops to look. So every passing was just super depressing. After we moved on from this horrific episode, we tried to determine how the disease got in our tank. I came up with the explanation that John had brought home 9 fish one day from a local fish store so I thought that was where the it came from. And after talking to a Petco rep, we were introduced to a flesh eating disease that fish develop when they become stressed. I believe it's called Columnaris. But you know how all fish carry diseases (ie. ick) and how it's just controlled and gets worse when stressed? Maybe this is how it emerged. Introducing that many fish in a tank at one time may have stressed them out. Regardless, it is done and over with and we have slowly rebuilt the tank. (This was written this past summer but like I said before, I'm a noob about blogging and haven't had a chance to post).
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