Severe is what landed us here......Pufferpunk wrote:This looks very severe. Poor thing!Are you sure you've never used meds in there? Definitely looks bacterial. Anything other than Maracyn will destroy your biological filter but at this point, he is desperate for help. Melafix/Pimafix/Maracyn all together, is what I'd recommend. Do 80% WC, to get that nitrate down.
I don't understand, "Water changes- 50gallons a day it is on a dip..Longer on the weekends". If all you have is a fahaka & a few bala sharks & doing 50g partials daily, your nitrate shouldn't be that high. Are you cleaning the substrate? What does your filtration media look like?
What's a "couple tor"?
There is NO meds in the tank. There never has been any meds in this tank, just salt. I don't care about damaging bio, there's a fully running seasoned ray system I can rob bio from, there's thousands of scrubbies in there, K1, or ceramic rings.
We understand puffers are sensative, BUT at the same time so are Potomotrygon species, which is what we raise. Our medicine cabinet contains quite a few meds for the rays, one of those meds is Binox. I have used Binox on other very sensative fish such as Hydrolycus species without ill effects as long as bio is supplemented.
The puffer's tank is on a drip system. It gets roughly 50 gallons of new water EVERY day. I'd love to tell you all about the nitrate being zero, but who here is going to believe that we are able to keep nitrates on a monster Fahaka's tank in check? Nobody. So I gave you the typical readings of a freshly cleaned sump. I bet they are back to nothing today.
There WAS 4 bala sharks in there. 1 died last night. a "few Tor" is 7. The biggest one MIGHT be 5" most in the 2-3" neighborhood. The balas are all under 4". The Fahaka is about 15". The lil Tor were divided off from the puffer for months. The divider kept getting knocked down and each time there was no evidence of anyone not getting along, so we just pulled the divider. that was about 3-4 weeks ago.
Really don't see a bunch of little "minnows" stressing the puffer enough to be a problem, but who knows. No matter now as they are all divided off again.
The filter- We run an ac 110 on there with a AQ 802 for circulation. The water leaves the tank via overflow and runs through a Tidepool 2 where all drawers get progressively finer mechanical media. After the bio wheel in the TP2 it enters our sump full of submerged (air fed) pot scrubbies. Probobly 30 gallons worth. The entire sump was cleaned at the first sign of problems. returned via mag pump.
Tell you the honest truth, we came here to this site to see if anyone could ID the disease that is likely going to take our puffer cause you all want to sit and coffee talk about tank size and water parameters. IF no one knows what the stuff on the puffer is just say that so we can look elsewhere for answers.
Thank you very much, AL (Stacyjo's bf)
