ammo 0
nitrite 0
nitrate 10
salinity 1.024
90g, 1 Takifugu Ocellatus, a couple of tiny hermit crabs
Eats scallops, shrimp, earthworms, occasioonal mussels and snails and jumbo krill, everything gets soaked in vitamin water. Water change 10% weekly or larger right now. Doug is fed by hemostat and therefore is a very clean eater, there is never excess food left in the tank.
Only thing added to water is reef salt and vit c. I have discontinued the vit c right now as the skimmer is off due to melafix dosing.
The tank has been set up for about a year.
Douggie had a big freakout last week, he swam super-fast, bashing himself ionto one side of the tank then the other. (He used to do this a lot when he was in the smaller tank I purchased him in but doesn't do it very much anymore.) He scratched himself a bit on the side, it didn't look that bad. But a couple days later the scratch developed an inflamed looking area around it, his colors looked crappy, and he seemed to have a bit of extra slime on him. It's hard to tell for sure because he's always got sand on him from burying himself, but it definitely looked like more than normal. He also seemed to be holding his mouth open more than usual, and it looked a little swollen, and like he was in pain. I started treatment with melafix on Thursday. (The melafix I have says for salt and freshwater but it says to turn off the skimmer, so I did. I've been very-wet-skimming to do small (5g) water changes for the last few days, then adding more melafix and turning the skimmer off.
Since then, one time when I look, he seems better, then the next time, he looks worse. He's still open-mouth "panting". He's always been an off-and-on eater, and has gone for weeks without eating, but he was in a good-eating phase and now isn't been showing an interest in food, even eartworms. Then yesterday it seemed like he wanted to eat but couldn't get most of it back. I'm starting to wonder if he broke or severely bruised his jaw
To make matters worse, I've never had reason to believe he had parasites, but 2 times in the last few days, I've checked on him and he's had a very small bit of white stuff at his opening (looks like empty casing), don't know if it's just poo but there's nothing to really poop out or what???
He's swimming around and behaving more or less normally, but the slime thing and the jaw thing are really freaking me out, I'm just really afraid something is seriously wrong and shouldn't be ignored... Suggestions??? I would be devastated if he died
