Clown has a boo-boo
My percula clown has a sore on the left side of his chin. It has definitely been getting worse as time goes on. It started off as just a dark dot on the chin and now is a scary multicolored monstrosity. I finally got a good pic of him, so I’ll try uploading it here.
May 21st, 2007 at 6:15 pm
Hi, hard to tell from the picture but it could be a fungal infection. How long did you leave it after your tank cycled before you added the clown fish, what are your water parameters, is the fish active and feeding?
Some important questions there – you have a couple of options really -
You can remove the fish from the display tank and treat in a separate quarantine tank with a copper based medication – it looks like you are using live rock as your primary filtration – if so any copper based medication will kill and inverts etc which are in the rocks.
You can treat the fish in your display tank using a non copper based treatment
You can leave the fish alone, reduce the feeding, monitor it closely and if it gets worse then decide if you want to treat it.
As said it is hard to tell from the picture, fungal infections are like fluffy cotton wool, however they do come in many more forms. It is possible that he/she has been damaged on rocks etc.
Hope this helps
Peter
May 30th, 2007 at 6:32 am
So, hows the clown doing?
July 26th, 2007 at 11:11 am
Wow, I need to figure out how to use my site better. I totally didn’t notice the pending comment from Peter. Sorry.
I’m slowly adding all my notes I took while starting the tank, so those should fill in a lot of the questions.
As for the clown, he stayed very active and normal, so I left him alone to see if he would pull through. I’d rather not run to various chemical “solutions” immediately upon seeing an issue, as I really don’t know how well most of those cocktails really work nor what they are really going to do to everything else in the tank.
The clown has almost completely recovered at this point. No cotton-y mouth and while you can see a bit of a spot on his chin it is very small. Throughout he has had a healthy appetite and seems to be his normal semi-oblivious self. But now I have wrasse woes. Granted, I need to update a lot more because you had no way of knowing I even had the wrasse!