Help!! Flukes in Reef Tank!!

[The WaterSide Fishing]

Help everyone yesterday I was looking through my reef tank and noticed a white spot on my blue hippo tang!? I thought it was a scratch from my purple tang but today I come back and see it has multiplied by a lot and there is now 7 plus dots, I think it flukes!!
I am a new saltwater aquarium owner and recently bought a 160 gallon tank from an existing owner and have no idea how to treat flukes and do not have a quantine tank, can I Medicate my main reef tank and how do I do it?

 

[The WaterSide Fishing]

Here is a better photo

 

[The WaterSide Fishing]

Please help me if you can

@Jay Hemdal

 

[The WaterSide Fishing]

Hey @thatmanMIKEson can you help me I suddenly had an out break of flukes

 

[ZeroCthulthu]

I just went through a velvet outbreak with my DT. The aquarium guy I go to made it very clear that medicating a tank with corals can kill off the corals. You can pick up a small cheapo tank at a Walmart as QT tank. And depending on what is going on with the fish, if you don't want to nuke your invertebrates you have to take the fish out of the tank so the parasites die off from not having a host.

 

[vetteguy53081]

Help everyone yesterday I was looking through my reef tank and noticed a white spot on my blue hippo tang!? I thought it was a scratch from my purple tang but today I come back and see it has multiplied by a lot and there is now 7 plus dots, I think it flukes!!
I am a new saltwater aquarium owner and recently bought a 160 gallon tank from an existing owner and have no idea how to treat flukes and do not have a quantine tank, can I Medicate my main reef tank and how do I do it?

View attachment 3116424

Need better pics under white lighting. These may be mucus cones instead of flukes. It is rare to see flukes other than on kind. Do not assume what you have.
With better pics, can do better assessment.
With flukes, you will see clamped fins, loss of appetite, heavy breathing and scratching as well as darting. For medicating anything, you want a separate quarantine tank which is as simple as a starter kit from walmart which has most of the essentials. Most medications are not safe for coral and invers/shrimp/snails.

 

[The WaterSide Fishing]

What causes mucus cones?

 

[thatmanMIKEson]

Hey @thatmanMIKEson can you help me I suddenly had an out break of flukes

I'll have to sit this one out, im not familiar with alot of fish ailments, if Jay responds he's the man to ask 4sure!

 

[vetteguy53081]

What causes mucus cones?

Often stems from previous copper use or previous skin irritation from as simple as ich. In turn they develop excess mucus from the producing skin cells and rises up as a cone or a plug in lieu of spreading across body.

 

[The WaterSide Fishing]

Here is a photo under white light

 

[The WaterSide Fishing]

It is also starting to happen to my purple tang I think

 

[The WaterSide Fishing]

@Jay Hemdal please help when you can

 

[Jay Hemdal]

@Jay Hemdal please help when you can

Sorry - I just woke up.

Flukes are normally not visible on fish, but you can see some of the secondary damage that they do. With flukes, a general tattered appearance and scratching are seen, and with advanced gill flukes, you'll see rapid breathing.

Tough to see in the photos, but I can't rule out ich here. As said, tangs are also prone to developing mucus plugs - these seem to be caused due to a reaction to some stress event. Trouble is, ich can be the stress event that causes them, meaning you get mixed mucus and ich spots.

Often, a random white spot here or these is just from minor scale damage. However, this fish developing an increasing number of spots in a short period tends to lean me away from that idea.

You can treat for flukes in your DT - Prazipro, dosed 2x, 8 days apart with very good aeration (remove carbon filtration and stop collecting skimmate, but still run your skimmer). However, if it is ich, things are different. You could try to do "ich management" - feed the fish well, run a strong UV and siphon off the sand each night to try and remove any resting stage tomonts. Some people also try low dose hydrogen peroxide, but that is tricky - at a high enough dose to work, you risk losing shrimp and some other invertebrates, and a low dose won't help.

Jay

 

[The WaterSide Fishing]

Thank you so much, the weird thing is the spot are really big