He does! I *really* appreciate his well thought out posts...concise, and full of pertinant information (Thank You, Richard!). Plus, since he IS a store owner, we know he sees, experiences, and treats MANY more of these maladies than we would, since we only generally see what goes on in our own tanks.Richard actually makes a great point
Well, I actually think it would. In our case, I wouldn't have wanted to cause anymore stress to one of our fish by taking it out and scraping it for a sample - BUT, since we've had so many fish die from this malady, I would've liked to have been able to examine samples from the first fish that died so the remaining inhabitants could be treated correctly. I literally spent several entire days reading about Velvet and the recommended treatments...during all that reading, I never found a picture online of an actual fish with the disease, or better yet, stages of the disease - only drawings (trust me, drawings don't help much). Even in our book "Conscientious Marine Aquarist", there were only drawings...basically a fish with dots, which looked exactly like the drawing they had for a fish with marine ich.Would it really help us all that much to be able to see it under the microscope?
At the last meeting at Stephen's house, I spoke to another MAAST member (experienced aquarist) who had a cherished fish he owned for quite some time die for no apparent reason. To this day, he does not know the reason it died, and still wonders. I can't speak for him, and won't say who it was (he may not want me to), but noting his concern over the matter, I can't help but think he would've liked to get a better insight into why his fish died. Sometimes, a microscope is the only way to determine what actually happened. To assist fish that are still living by examining a tankmate that has already died, we are able to approach the treatment needs of the remaining fish in a concise manner rather than just guessing at what they have and the resulting treatment. So many treatments are very stressful on the fish, and if we can avoid performing unnecessary treatments, I think our fish would be better off. The more experience and knowledge we have in identifying these problems, the better we will be at approaching future illnesses in our tanks AND the tanks of others. "Knowledge is power" definitely rings true here.
I am truly sad that we've lost so many fish in our tank recently, but it has given me a new found interest in fish diseases, and the limited variety of treatments we now have availb. to us. Richard is 100 percent correct when he said copper can be very deadly when wielded by an inexperienced aquarist...it is FAR to easy to overdose. In one of the links that JimD provided to me, there was mention of research in treatment with Hydrogen Peroxide (I posted this portion of the article in our "Ich/Velvet" help thread). I have great hope for this turning into a commercial product that we can all safely use to combat this horrible malady (Velvet) as the success rates in their experimentations were very high.
Wendy
