Selecting Fish

[neoh74]

I had purchased a yellow eyed kole tang a month ago. The owner of the LFS does a fresh water dip upon arrival and recommended one before introducing to my tank. I acclimated him for about two hours, performed the fresh water dip in ciclid water and introduced him to the tank. The clowns love to be around him but he just wanted to hide. By day two he was kissing the glass and the live rock but would never eat anything else.Nothing from the clip, nori, seaweed with garlic...not even banded to a rock. about week three there was a white spot on his fin. Just one. i remembered thinking that cant be white spot...its only one...that night he looked like he had the fish measles. Trying to catch him to quarantine him he bashed his face on one of the rocks so i stopped. I got a cleaner shrimp and treated the water. he looked better for about 2 days but tonight he layed down on the sand breathing hard when I caught him. I quarantined him but he didnt make it.

shy of quarentining for a month what else could I have done to prevent this tragedy again? How do you get them to eat? I feel if he would have started eating he would have been healthy enough to survive and would not have gotten ick.

100 gallon reeef tank, live rock, live sand, 6 small coral, 2 clowns, 1 fire shrimp, 3 peppermint shrimp, 2 conchs, 20 snails. nitrates at 10-20, salinity 1.024, for the most part all levels are normal.:headwally:

[eastlake]

While its possible that if it was eating prepared foods it would've remained healthy enough to fend off being completely overwhelmed, but, that doesn't mean that it didn't already have ick when you brought it home, regardless of freshwater dips. Without quarantine there's no sure fire way to ensure that your fish won't have ick when you put it into the reef aquarium, in fact, now that its in there the only way to get rid of it for sure is to remove the fish and keep them out of there for no less than a month as I think that ick can survive for plus or minus 30 days without a host, there's a really good sticky in the fish disease forum about ick. As far as the eating goes, while it was a good thing that it was eating the naturally occurring food in the tank, and given enough time it would've switched to what you were giving it, I always ask the store to feed a fish that I'm interested in to make sure that it's eating. I know that doesn't help now but it's something to keep in mind.

[neoh74]

Thanks eastlake. So If I dont pull my clowns out that are healthy there is no way to get rid of the ick?