The wife, who is an expert at spotting ich, called me over to take a look at Red last night after shabbos. It's a good thing she looks, because I'm pretty much in denial that any of my fish could ever have a disease. In any case, it was pretty inevitable. If Fins had ich, then removing Fins from the tank wasn't going to solve the problem. Once the ich is in the water it will find a host. It will only die if it has no fish to host it. With Red and Jaws still in the display tank, the ich wasn't going anywhere.
So Red has ich, and Jaws--while still not showing any signs of it--will get it eventually. Now the question is what to do about it. The big issue is that I've already started hypo on Fins, which means that the salinity in the QT is very low, and throwing Red and Jaws inside will just kill them through shock. I contemplated setting up another QT, but without a viable source of biological filtration on hand, I decided that they've got a better shot in the QT. So what I'm drip acclimating them to the lower salinity over the course of the day. It's a long time for a couple of fish to sit in a bucket, but I figure that they send fish in bags overnight across the country. Hopefully they'll pull through--the jury is still out.
In the meantime, catching the two was pretty difficult. Red was particularly hard to catch, and it forced me to move all the rocks around, destroying the aquascape that was and forcing me to create a new one. The resulting aquascapes has its pros and cons. On the one hand, we can now see Greeny, who is basically front and center. All of the rockwork is pushed to the back corner of the tank, so everything--the rock, the tank--all look bigger. The con is the effect all the moving will have on the coral. It's all in very different locations now, often further from the light. We'll have to see if it pulls through.
Last night I had a bit of a scare with Fins. I was out all day and didn't have a chance to check on him. When I finally got home at night he was obviously spooked, breathing fast and not eating. The not-eating scared me the most because even in hypo he's been a pretty voracious eater. I quickly realized that I forgot to buffer the water that day and that the PH probaby spiked. I through in a little calcium carbonate and Fins quickly began to calm down.
So to conclude and sum up, I'm worried about the Red and Jaws, and more the Jaws than Red. The display tank is empty of fish, but Pincher and "Emeraldo" the Emerald Crab that came along with Greeny are having a blast playing king of the castle. The hypo treatment in the QT is going to go for about four weeks, at which time I'm going to start raising the salinity. Meanwhile, over the course of that time the display tank will remain free of fish, so that the ich can cycle, find that there is no viable host, and die a much deserved death. In the meantime, here's some shots of Pincher and Greeny.
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