Porcupine fish, going blind after eating frozen shrimp

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Since this board has been up, we have found there are several questions that routinely get asked in order to help diagnose problems. If you can have that information to begin with in your post, we'll be able to help right away (if we can!) without having to wait for you to post the info we need.

1) Your water parameters - pH, Ammonia, Nitrite, Nitrates and salinity (if appropriate). This is by far the most important information you can provide! Do not answer this with "Fine" "Perfect" "ok", that tells us nothing. We need hard numbers.

2) Tank size and a list of ALL inhabitants. Include algae eaters, plecos, everything. We need to know what you have and how big the tank is.

3) Feeding, water change schedule and a list of all products you are using or have added to the tank (examples: Cycle, Amquel, salt, etc)

4) What changes you've made in the tank in the last week or so. Sometimes its the little things that make all the difference.

5) How long the aquarium has been set up, and how did you cycle it? If you don't know what cycling is read this: Fishless Cycling Article and familiarize yourself with all the information. Yes. All of it.

We want to help, and providing this information will go a LONG way to getting a diagnosis and hopeful cure that much faster.

While you wait for assistance:
One of the easiest and best ways to help your fish feel better is clean water! If you are already on a regular water change schedule (50% weekly is recommended) a good step to making your fish more comfortable while waiting for diagnosis/suggestions is to do a large water change immediately. Feel free to repeat daily or as often as you can, clean water is always a good thing! Use of Amquel or Prime as a dechlor may help with any ammonia or nitrite issues, and is highly recommended.

Note - if you do not normally do large water changes, doing a sudden, large water change could shock your fish by suddenly changing their established water chemistry. Clean water is still your first goal, so in this case, do several smaller (10%) water changes over the next day or two before starting any large ones.
TheShield

Re: Porcupine fish, going blind after eating frozen shrimp

Post by TheShield »

It's been a while since all started, in the meanwhile the fish has improved considerably and now it can actually see object moving outside and inside of the aquarium, following a finger on the glass, reacting when I wave my hand feets off the aquarium, hiding during day in live rock.

Most important, he can track and eat the food coming into the aquarium so I no longer feed him using a stick. Feeding large variety of frozen food, using Vitachem and Selcom every other day as suplement. I'd say he recovered about 75% of the eye sight, still not seeing perfectly (as sometimes it takes two attempts to pick some food) but when all of this issue started it wasn't able to see anything 1 inch in front of him.

He may or may not recover 100% of it's eyesight but the question remains, what could've caused him to lose in that quick in the first place? Was it the nutrition? Was it the water quality? The cowfish? A combination of these? I'm upset I'll never know the answer to the above.
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Arny
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Re: Porcupine fish, going blind after eating frozen shrimp

Post by Arny »

FADE2BLACK_1973 wrote:
Pufferpunk wrote:This is his normal way to do "self dentistry".
+1
I thought Porcy's don't have a beak like mouth, don't they just have 2 crushing plates, one at the top and one at the bottom?
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Re: Porcupine fish, going blind after eating frozen shrimp

Post by Pufferpunk »

Pufferglasses?
You are getting sleepy... you only hear the sound of my voice... you must do water changes... water changes... water changes... water changes...

"The solution to pollution is dilution!"
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