is pop-eye contagious? seems like one of my fish is going through an early stage of it. (cloudy eyes, slightly bulged). any info. on treatment would be apprecieated.
If you can put him in quarantine melafix will get rid of it, but i have never tried it in a reef system so i don't know if it is reef safe. It supposedly is and states on the label it is.
is it something that could be cured through good water condition and nutrition? a QT would be hard for me to set up at this time... should I also be worried about the pop eye spreading to other fish in the tank?
Pop eye is a condition caused by stress and or poor water quality. It is usually associated with another kind of sickness that made the fish stressed out and can usually be reversed if provided with a non stressful, healthy, clean enviornment. If you see any other symptoms; not eating, swimming up and down in the same spot, constant corner hugging, gasping for air, etc. You will need to setup a quarentine and find the root of the problem.
For now just provide a good varied diet and wait to see if it gets worse. fwiw, i have an eight line wrasse in my 210 that has had popeye for three weeks and is fine still lol. I can't catch him as there is 250lbs of live rock in the tank and my corals have grown bigger than the opening, so i am waiting it out.
good luck bud.
austin
thanks austin. i'm glad i caught it at an early stage, so i'm going to add more variety to the diet and see if it helps. doesn't seem that bad yet, judging by the level of cloudiness on the eye... i'm doing a water test now and so far, ammonia and nitrate seems to be at a 0, pH a little low but probably because it's night...and salinity dropped a bit 1.024. i'm going to raise the salinity and retest the pH in the morning to make sure.