Copper treatment fails?

Henryw25

Member
About a week and a half ago, I started the copper treatment to get rid of a parasite... or what I thought was a parasite... Everything seemed to be going okay. The hospital tank they were getting the treatment in seemed to be spot on.

The copper levels were settling around 5 tenths. The pH was at 8.2, nitrite & nitrate were at 0, and the ammonia was around 2 tenths. The water was clear, and the fish seemed comfortable.

Then for about a day, the clowns started looking ill and were swimming on the surface. The first thing I thought was an ammonia spike, I tested the water and everything was unchanged as listed above. So I decided to wait until the next day to see how everything was doing. I got up the next morning and all but one fish was on the bottom dead. :( I have no idea what could have happened. I took the remaining fish from the hospital tank and put him back in the host tank.

This leads to my next observation. I observed that none of the fish showed signs of a parasite in the hospital tank even days before the treatment was started. Then when I transferred him back over into the host tank, he immediately started flashing again within seconds. Maybe it's not a parasite and it's something else that has to do with my host tank water?

Does anyone have any ideas of what could have caused the death of these fish or what could be infecting my host water? I am planning on transferring the little bit of bio life I have left into a QT and doing a full water change. What do you think?
 

DaveK

Well-Known Member
Here are a few questions that need to be answered before we can really help you...

What parasite were you trying to treat for?
What copper medication were you using?
When you say "5 tenths" for the copper level, what exactly were you measuring? Usually you want to treat at about .15 - .20 mg/l. If you used .5, you'd be way too high, and .05 would be way too low.

Some general notes on disease treatment -

There are a lot of different parasites and diseases, you have to match the treatment to the disease.
Fish can scratch of flash for a number of reasons. The most common are disease, especially parasites, another common one is water quality that they do not like.

At this point water changes are most likely your best choice. You'll need to make quite a few large ones to replace a ll the water in the display tank.
 

LSUFireGal

Member
I have never used copper but I have a fish in a 10 gallon QT right now and I had to lower the water level a bit so that the hang on filter would splash water in and disturb the surface enough for gas exchange. Do you think maybe your dissolved oxygen level got too low?

That is the only thing that I can think of if your numbers were good, and your copper level was safe. I am not sure what level it should be at though so double check that you are using the right amount as per the instructions and make sure you are using the right copper test. Copper meds require different brands of copper tests.
 

SubRosa

Well-Known Member
Iirc you said you were using Cupramine? .5 ppm would be the proper dosage for that product, but there's a kernel of wisdom in Dave K's comment about your dosage. Cupramine is a complexed form of copper. It's not quite as available biologically as ionic copper such as in the form of plain old copper sulphate solution, aka Aquarisol, which is why the dosage is higher. The proper dosage for ionic copper is as Dave says. I have always found the best results with ionic copper, but proper monitoring of the concentration is critical. A mild overdose is much worse than with complexed copper.
 
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