• Folks, if you've recently upgraded or renewed your annual club membership but it's still not active, please reach out to the BOD or a moderator. The PayPal system has a slight bug which it doesn't allow it to activate the account on it's own.

feeding an antheas

R

razorfingerz

i bought a lyre tail antheas yesterday.. when i woke up today he had a small case of ich, wont eat.. any tricks? i offered him a variety of stuff already.. some advice would be great.
 
J

jmckdvm

Guest
Hopefully, you have him in a quarantine tank. If not, you now have the parasite in your main tank (if it wasn't there already). If you have a quarantine tank, raise the temperature to 80 degrees, and drop the SG to 1.017 (some would say drop it to 1.009). If you have UV, that could help a little. Frequent, large water changes can help "dilute" the parasite concentration. Chloroquine phosphate is probably the treatment of choice (if the fish is not in the main tank). (You can read more about this drug on my FORUM: Dr. Jim's Reef Corner at the Amwell Bird Hospital). If you live near Hillsborough (Central Jersey) you can come pick up some tablets today or Sunday if you would like. (I can also mail it to you but you probably wouldn't get it until Tuesday.)

Hope this helps.
Dr. Jim
 
J

jmckdvm

Guest
Forgot to mention: for feeding, try live brine shrimp, or frozen brine, mysis or Pacific Plankton (which is a brand of food comprised of Euphausia pacifica, a plankton krill.) I mix the three of these frozen foods together, thawed, then add Selcon, an omega 3 & 6 fatty acid supplement, and re-freeze). If you only had him one day, it is not a surprise that he hasn't eaten yet.
 
D

DaveK

Long term success with antheas usually require a large tank, and a school of them. They also need almost constant feeding. Make sure you can meet these requirements before you decide to keep the fish.
 
jimroth

jimroth

DaveK said:
Long term success with antheas usually require a large tank, and a school of them. They also need almost constant feeding. Make sure you can meet these requirements before you decide to keep the fish.
Click to expand...
The theory that anthias need to be in a group is not considered to be true anymore. According to Scott Michael, many do better singly.

I have a M+F pair of Squarespot Anthias, which I love. The male beat up the other females which were smaller, I had to remove them. I feed my anthias 2-3 times per day. They don't eat much besides frozen mysis shrimp, PE brand. There's a lot of calories in those! The only other food they will eat is frozen bloodworms, and they are not very enthusiastic about it. :p
 
D

DaveK

jimroth said:
...The theory that anthias need to be in a group is not considered to be true anymore. According to Scott Michael, many do better singly. ...
Click to expand...

Do you have a source for this? I'd like to know more. I tried to do a search on the net and didn't get any good results. Thanks.
 
D

DaveK

I guess I'll have to take your word for it for the time being. At about $50 a copy, I'm not about to spend that much to see a small section. Perhaps you or someone can scan the relevant section, and post it.
 
jimroth

jimroth

DaveK said:
I guess I'll have to take your word for it for the time being. At about $50 a copy, I'm not about to spend that much to see a small section. Perhaps you or someone can scan the relevant section, and post it.
Click to expand...
It's a long section, so I don't want to type it. Basically he says it's a misconception and some species actually do better if kept singly. He says the misconception stems from the fact that anthias group on the reef in SHOALS of THOUSANDS of fish, with a social hierarchy. It's not like a SCHOOL of neon tetras, where everybody's a pal. In the shoal, the fish at the bottom are outcasts. In the aquarium, they try to recreate that behavior, only with say six or seven fish, which means everybody's kicking the butt of the low fish on the totem pole, and so that fish dies. Then there's a new bottom fish, and so on and so on.
In the big group, there's dozens of fish on the bottom, which spreads out the aggression.
 
C

calaxa

Razor,

What Dr. Jim is correct. You've now introduced ich into your main tank. If you're able to catch the anthias, move him into a quarantine tank. You can go several ways about treating for ich:

1) hyposalinity (SG 1.017 will only mask the problem....it must be below 1.010)
2) copper
3) Chloroquine phosphate

You can just try to treat the anthias and hope no trophonts have gone into the display tank. (Very wishful thinking though)
A UV sterlizier is pretty much worthless. It just kills any free swimming ich parasites. To give you an idea, I have a UV sterilizer in my QT and SG 1.022. Kole tang showed ich and continued to get worse. I dropped salinity down to 1.019 within 1.5 hrs and all cysts dropped immediately from his body. UV sterilizer is pretty much only good for making yellow/green water clear. Personally I would take all your fish and hypo them for 4 weeks.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top