Fish Injury or Disease?

[Reefd Up]

Ugh, so, I get to deal with this today.  My female Watanabe Angel has what looks like an injury above her eye.  Yesterday it looked like a fresh scrape, and today it looks like a few of the scales are missing to reveal the white flesh.  She's eating well (such a pig) and is swimming around normally.  Ocassionally she will shake her head, but that's the only weird thing we've noticed.  I was worried it was maybe LLE (lateral line erosion) (aka hole-in-head), but it was a sudden onset.  We feed a variety of food...changing it up daily almost.  We use a mixture of shrimp, clams, oysters, R/G/B algae, garlic, etc then alternate that with Spectrum II, cyclopeeze, and other pellet food.  The only other fish are 5 chromis (so no one to pick on her).  We also haven't run carbon on the tank yet, so I don't think the carbon particles could be attributing to the LLE (if that is what it is).

My conclusion is that it is simply an injury from a rock.  Any other thoughts?  Will a fish injury normally heal itself fine, or is there anything additional I can do to speed her recovery?  Would a cleaner shrimp help prevent infection? 

[micki]

I would think a cleaner shrimp would be helpful. 

[slandis3]

Nikki how is your fish doing? I heard stress coat works on skin injury’s you might give that a try.

[Joel]

Do I need to again point out that stresscoat is not a medication and that electrolytes do not directly heal injuries and that it is highly unlikely that a saltwater fish will be electrolyte depleted? Stresscoat may dechlorinate tap water but all the other hype and claims is garbage.

Good clean, stress free environment with excellent vitamin enriched diet will significantly strengthen a fishes immune system. Or in some cases broad sprctrum antibiotic in a established quarantine system.

[Reefd Up]

I picked up a cleaner shrimp (I've always wanted one...and figured this was the best excuse I could ever have for getting one.)  I don't know if that helped or not, but I just made sure to do a nice water change, turned the skimmer to run a bit more wet, fed her a bit more, and crossed my fingers. 

The worst the injury got was an almost dime size circle of flesh gone above her eye down to the white tissue.  It was pretty nasty.  The first day of the shrimp made it look worse, but I think he was just trying to get the dead skin off...so he picked at it quite a bit.  The past two days she's been healing very quickly.  I hope it doesn't leave too much scarring, but I think she'll recover 100%.  My best guess is she just hit a rock - there's a tunnel she likes to swim through, and it's getting a bit narrow for her now that she's getting even bigger.

I have to say, watching the cleaner shrimp and the angel was the most interesting thing ever.  As soon as the shrimp went in the tank, the angel swam right up to him and started doing a dance (wiggling all over).  The shrimp was trying to find a nice hiding place, but the angel kept following doing her dance.  The shrimp tried to clean her a few times, but he kept going for her injury...and she kept jerking away since the shrimp was probably hurting her a little bit.  Anyway, it's been amazing to watch...and funny b/c my chromis fish keep far away from the shrimp.

[micki]

Glad you got a cleaner Nikki!    I personally think they are an important part of our tanks! 

[cyberwollf]

My fish dont go NEAR my cleaner... The only thing it cleans is my hand when i am doing work in the tank...Its a weird feeling as it picks at my fingernails for dead skin and stuff