Terrible Advice Tuesdays: A Quick And Easy Treatment For Marine Velvet?
Terrible Advice Tuesdays: If you’ve got fish that is sick with marine velvet (Amyloodinium ocellatum), just treat it with hypo salinity. That will kill the velvet.
The rest of the story: I hear the hypo salinity treatment for velvet A LOT which is sad as hypo salinity will do very little if anything against velvet. As described in my marine disease and quarantine guide, Velvet has been found down to specific gravities of 1.002 (2.6 ppt). Therefore, velvet will merely laugh at a hypo salinity treatment and walk away.
If you’ve got a marine velvet affected fish, I recommend copper treatment in a quarantine tank of course! Don’t put copper in your reef display tank!
Browse the Store! Questions?
Will hypo salinity help kill ich though? Along with the use of copper and a raised temperature of 79-80 degrees of course.
Hypo salinity will kill ich if you follow the proper procedure but you should not use hypo and copper treatments at the same time as the unstable pH of hypo saline water can cause the copper to become overly toxic and can kill your fish.
Mark I remember telling you that I used hyper instead of hypo over a 3-4 day period & got all the cysts to burst. You expressed doubt asking me “are you sure it wasn’t hypo”. I’ve been a near junkie reef keeper for more than a decade and am certain I used salinity of 1.028 up to 1.032 gradually with the cysts popping on the second & third 5 min dips. And yes no-one can give me a answer as to why this succeeded with a junior hippo tang.
love your work.
Pierre..by “bursting” did you mean the cysts were no longer on the fish?
No mark they stayed on the fish but on close inspection I could see they’d burst.
Then over the next few days they all fell off. They were big enough to see the burst white dots. These wouldn’t have been ich would they. I was not sure, but some time later a small fish had ich & died and they were much smaller.
Hi Mark, in a fish only set up , has anyone ever experimented with have a piece of copper pipe in one of the water lines so that the tank will get a continuous dose of copper , or would this be over the top !
steve…most pennies don’t contain that much copper. Copper concentrations have to be maintained at a proper level for them to be effective against diseases
I am pretty new to saltwater, but I believe that I had marine velvet from the start. Every fish I’ve had dies within about 2 weeks. Sexy shrimp, little starfish, snails & crabs are fine, but I can’t keep fish. I don’t really know what to do to make my tank safe for fish. I’ve read to go fishless for 6 weeks. Is this right? Will it be ok to add fish after this time?