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Old 04/04/2003, 09:10 PM
Newflee Newflee is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Canada
Posts: 386
Well to be honest it is best to have already set up a quarantine tank with an aquaclear hang on or other cheap filter. Set up a 10-20 gallon quarantine like that with a damsel in it full time and you won't ever have a problem. Asuming you have not done that I would perhaps get an aquaclear filter or similar and put the biological media (sponge) in your overflow or sump for a few weeks to seed it. That is if you can wait for a few weeks before you start treatment. If you can't and if you feel you need to treat right away, you will have to do daily water changes and that is going to make your copper treatment challenging.
I think the first thing you need to do is determine what parisite your dealing with. If it is oodinium or Brook you'll need to move fast. If it's C. Irritans you can likely do a few things within your display over the next few weeks while you get a proper quarantine ready. Such things include: feeding garlic soaked food, lowering salinity and frequent substrate cleaning (daily).
C. Irritans looks like a speck of salt or large dust particle on the skin. It is usually noticed first on the fins and then migrates to the flanks. If it is a smaller speck that looks like a dusting almost sheeting the flanks you'll likely have oodinium and treatment is needed immediately. Whatever you have, if you can easily catch your fish (I suspect not), a freshwater dip will relieve them of what's eating them right now. Treatment can follow once you are more prepared.
What do you see?
Are the fish respiring rapidly?
Are they eating?
A word of warning. It may appear within the next few days to weeks that the parisite has gone away but it is merely in a different stage of life and will come back 100 fold. The only way to get rid of it entirely is to treat the fish and leave the display fish free as described previously.
Set up a proper quarantine, salvage what you can and learn a lesson. Never, ever, ever, put an unquarantined fish into your display.
Let me know what your fish look like currently.
Do you have a tank that can be set up permanently as a quarantine?