Emergency sick Seahorse

[cephcrazy]

Hi All,

I ordered one Seahorses off Blue Zoo. Big mistake, when he arrived it was the wrong sex after a rude phone call I paid for and was shipped a second. By the time this one arrived the first was acting funny.
So I kept an eye on it, not have a quarantine tank at the time. After a day the two new ones were both sick one with noticeable snout rot probably Vibrio.

I then bought a hospital tank and placed all 6 in and dosed with KanaPlex and Furan-2 in conjunction.
After a day I lost both from Blue Zoo, and the other four had looked okay so I moved them back. With the exception our largest was worse since we put her i the hospital.

Our largest horse still hasn't improved and is lethargic but will eat if food is right in front of her. We are afraid that the medicine might not be safe and are unsure whether to put her back in the hospital.


Medicine- KanaPlex and Furan-2

All water perimeters look good.

Any first hand advice welcome!!

 

[rayjay]

Well, I'm sorry you've had such a bad experience with seahorse keeping as I personally find it to be a great joy in my life for the past ten years now, but I've had many of my own trials and tribulations.
It sounds like you had four seahorses before you ordered these new ones. Were the last ones ordered from the same source as the original ones? How long have you had the original ones?
What kind of tank and set up are they in? Other tankmates? Temp of tank?
You have done the right thing by treating in a hospital tank. I've not used KanaPlex and Furan-2 together but rely just on the Furan-2 for my bacteria medication.
Dropping the temperature in the hospital tank to 68° can help immensely but don't drop the temp more than 4° per day depending on where it is at now. This really slows up the bacterial advance and can help in stopping it.
I've experienced a lot of problem with seahorses not eating, or not eating much, when being treated and it can be partly medication and can be partly the seahorse just not feeling like eating when it is sick and stressed, much like we do at times.
The best thing I find then is to feed live foods like mysid shrimp (mysis if you can't get mysid), adult brine shrimp, or even gammarus and amphipods if you have access to them. It's better that they be enriched first, even on spirulina powder/flake is good, but if you have a fatty acid enrichment that will help.
If you haven't finished the medicine treatment to it's recommended full term you are risking making the bacteria resistant and harder to treat when the problem arises again.
I ALWAYS put seahorses afflicted with bacterial disease into a hospital tank, drop to 68° or as close as possible, and treat for the full regimen before even thinking of returning them to the display.
Seahorse keeping unfortunately is "hard learning" process for most of us. Only a few luck in and never seem to have any problems.

 

[Red C Aquarium]

I sell seahorses locally!!

 

[rayjay]

This thread is a request for help for a problem a seahorse keeper has. IT SHOULD NOT BE A THREAD FOR COMMERCIAL PURPOSES EVEN THOUGH YOU ARE A SPONSOR!!!!

 

[Red C Aquarium]

Rayjay , I can really help a local seahorse hobbyist.

I may have solutions as I sell them here at my LFS.

This is a general discussion ,generally you will have better luck buying seahorses locally , it just happens.

Redc

 

[rayjay]

You may indeed have solutions, and if so, you should be posting them here in the thread for the OP to take advantage of. He still has the original four remaining, and it's about making sure of their survival, not getting new ones to add to at this time. You should NEVER add seahorses to a tank with seahorses already in it that have come from another breeding source.
As I don't know you, I can't say what your level of knowledge is or isn't, but in my 10 yrs of seahorse keeping I've learned that VERY FEW LFSs have sufficient knowledge of seahorse keeping to be selling them to people.
I'm hoping you are one that does.
What breeders do you use for your stock you sell? Do you have separate systems for keeping a seahorse species in that hasn't had, nor will have in between batches of seahorses? What temperature do you keep them at? What do you recommend for tank size for a pair of standard seahorses? Do you direct would be purchasers of seahorses to register at seahorse.org, the largest most up to date site for information to give the best chance of success in seahorse keeping? These are a few of the important things that IMO, determine the quality of the store selling seahorses.
As there are VERY FEW breeders of TRUE captive bred seahorses, that means there aren't many stores that are going to be able to sell them.
The rest are basically what we call "tank raised" that are raised in large cement tanks, mostly in Asia but not exclusively, in water that hasn't sufficiently been filtered and treated for pathogens, so that the ONLY advantage these have over "wild caught" is that they have been trained to eat frozen foods, but still have the same pathogens that present so many problems.
Many stores call these captive bred as being raised in tanks could be considered captivity, but, there is difference as TRUE captive bred are raised in water sufficiently filtered and treated for pathogens, or, in water from commercial salts. Some stores knowingly call these as captive bred instead of tank raised, while others have been misled by wholesalers and transhippers and have no idea of the true situation of what they are selling.
Another problem is that a lot of the seahorses are sold even before they have fully developed their sexual maturity, many without even showing beginning signs. These seahorses have higher odds of dying than do the sexually mature ones. This is a result of trying to get them out of the breeding facility as fast as they can to make room for more oncoming fry.

 

[Red C Aquarium]

nice to see no caps on that post ,I did see your point .


Cool I would love talk with you about horses but that doesnt help his remaining horses either.

Let me see what I can recommend to help out , what kind of seahorses and what size are they?
The poster didnt really tell a lot.

stress is a big key with seahorses
I have kept erectus, reidi , kuda, tiger tail ,kelloggi and found many opinions about all of them.

I find freshwater mysis work wonders for a sad horse,
Red c

 

[Red C Aquarium]

I think there is another one called seahorsesource.com

REDC

 

[Red C Aquarium]

rayjay im on my second batch of two tigertails from vietnam m/c- t/r- c/b what ever they are.

Trained to eat? the first to took 2 months to eat frozen well then I sold them to the new parents(they didnt want to wait but i made them because they werent ready yet).

and the two I have now are not ready for frozen and they have been here for 3 weeks.
They are eating in my 55 gallon refuge laced with macro and copepods including live copepods connected to a 300 gallon display system .
When they get comfortable they change color to adapt , when they shipped in there where black from stress.


redc

 

[rayjay]

Well, unless the OP is going to respond with more detail, neither of us will be able to help much.
I love H. comes tigertails, but we can't get them here any more. Just like the angustus and barbs I had many years ago, we can no longer get because Dr Mic Payne packed in his breeding facility in Australia.
For a while we were getting a decent quality reidi from Aquamarine International, good size and quality, but success breeds poor present stock that is small and not sexable and quality is very questionable.
I'm wondering if they are now getting supplemental stock from other companies that DON'T properly treat the water like AI was known to do for quite some time.
The ONLY true captive bred I'm aware of coming into Canada at the present time are H. erectus that come from seahorsecorral.com in Florida. I started importing them a few years back and then convinced a store to bring them in now.
I would love to bring some in from seahorsesource.com but Dan doesn't want to be bothered shipping out of country because of all the hassle with paperwork and cities and vet examinations.
In spite of the fact I can't buy from Dan, he has continually over the years helped me and others that can't buy from him, regardless of that fact.
If you can ever arrange for any of his seahorses to come to you, you won't find any better IMO.
If you can find a way to start keeping the seahorses in dedicated systems, it would improve the odds of success for your customers.
IMO, probably the second biggest killer of seahorses after bacterial disease is pathogen transfer, where seahorses get exposed to pathogens from other fish that they haven't grown up with. Placing in a system that has contained or does containe other fish opens this exposure to which many seahorses succumb to in time as they don't seem to be able to acclimate themselves like most salt water fish do.
Like anything else, some do it and have no problems, but most are going to end up regretting doing so in time.
As for eating copepods, they are likely feeding on gammarus and amphipods and possibly some mysid if they can catch them, as most copepods are too small for them to take an interest in, and even if they did, they are too small to have any significance in the nutrition of the seahorses. Copepods can work quite well for seahorse fry though, as long as they are appropriately sized and even better, enriched.

 

[cephcrazy]

Hi Guys,

Looks like things were heated up in my absences. Lol

Work had me busy!

But I have good news, the four remaining horses seem to be in good spirits!! Eating well and their behavior is back to normal.

Species- 1 large Reidi, 1 medium hybrid Reidi/Erectus(Seahorsesource.com's), 2 small black? I believe hippocampus Erectis?

Normally I would agree these discussions should stay on topic. Yet I am always interested in new a LFS, especially if you have horses!
Gotta run will be back with a final update tomorrow; I hope!