Blue Tang with Seizures

[daavvee]

this small blue tang who ive looked after for half a year now is having seizures,

he has short bursts of erratic, high speed movement, the poor fish just goes crazy. it is nothing like the exercising he used to do of fast paced but controlled swimming. during these seizures his spines are extended fully.

after a burst, he seeks refuge under some rock, there are no compatability issues with other fish, and the system is far from stocked. the most recent new inhabitant has been around for 2 months, and neither show any interest in the other, my blue tang has always been healthy active and friendly and now i dont know what is wrong, there is plenty of in tank algae, i also feed spirulina flake and nori every day and brineshrimp once a week

he doesnt have any white spots, is not scraping, and i cant see any problems around his gills, he still has control over his balance and horizontal alignment.

if anyone has seen this kind of thing before, please help! i assume my poor fish has got some kind of internal problem, what would the best method of treatment be? temp/salinity changes? copper? i really dont know much about diseases :(

thanks for your time, dave

[ATJ]

Dave,

I used to have a blue tang that did pretty much the same thing every morning at around the time of lights on. It eventually jumped from the tank. :( I never found out for sure what was wrong, but I had a banded coral shimp in the tank I suspect it may have been chasing the tang. In the period I have that shrimp in the tank a number of small fish vanished and a manadrin fish and a cleaner wrasse also jumped from the tank.

Is brine shrimp the only animal matter you are feeding the tang? Juvenile blue tangs (Paracanthurus hepatus) feed primarily on zooplankton and only move to benthic algae as adults. It is quite possible that the seizures are caused by a lack of animal protein.

I strongly recommend you increase the amount of animal matter you feed the tang. Try some Hikari "Mysis Shrimp", minced shrimp, minced mussels, etc..

[daavvee]

thanks atj, its been a while :D

i didnt realise that juveniles werent into algae that much. i will try that, im going back over everything to try and fix this little guy up.

[TerryB]

You might try treating it for gill flukes with a series of formalin dips. Do you have a grounding probe on the tank?
Terry B

[daavvee]

unfortunatley the little guy passed not long ago, ive taken some photos, so ill try and get them up soon. thanks for your help, im off to speak to an electrician friend about grounding probes tomorrow hopefully.

i hate losing fish, it took me 3 years in the hobby before i was confident enough to get a tang and after all that it still turned out bad.

thanks again for your help, dave