Iggy the Dragonet

On New Year’s Eve we purchased a Mandorin Dragonet. These are known to be difficult fish to keep on account of their eating habits. These guys, usually, cannot be trained to eat frozen food. They eat copepods, which need to be alive and plentiful in your tank. Dragonetts will starve within a month if they do not have the proper food source. We introduced copepods into our tank a few months prior to purchasing him so had a healthy stock in the tank already.

Another thing about Dragonets is that they generally do not do well in quarantine. With all the medications that may need to be dosed into a QT, copepods do not survive and therefore the dragonets starve. Therefore, you generally put Dragonets directly into your DT without quarantine.

We purchased ours, called him Iggy, and put him in our DT. It didn’t take long before I realized his tail looked a smidge ratty. But he was swimming around and eating,  seemingly alright. Dragonets don’t move around fast so sometime hermits or cleaning crew can nip at their tails. So we hoped that may be the case for his ratty tail. Boy were we wrong. It didn’t take long before we realized he had tail rot and it was upon first arriving in the tank. We weren’t sure what to do to help him since we knew there wasn’t a chance he would survive quarantine where we could dose him with the medicine he needed.

After consulting with some stores we decided to do medicinal dips. On January 4^th, we put KanaPlex in a 5 gallon bucket with an air stone and transferred Iggy in there. We did it for an hour to make sure it didn’t stress him out too much. He was fine.

We waited a few more days, his rot got worse, and we dipped him again on January 7^th. Afterwards, we put him into the sump with Princess instead of the DT so that there would be less stress on him (especially to catch him if necessary) and no hermits could get to him. There are copepods in our sump so he would still have food if he got his appetite back.

Two days later we decided to do one final treatment because his rot was progressing so severely we figured it was go big or go home. There was no way he would bounce back from it without help. We left him in treatment for a 24-hour period. He survived it without apparent stress and we put him back into the sump area. Sadly, he died a few days later on the 12^th.

When you have a fish with fin or tail rot you should always quarantine them because there is a chance your other fish may get sick. However, we took the chance on account of our water parameters are excellent (healthy water=healthy fish). Also, none of our fish had any open sores or cuts (that we could see), which is how the bacteria spreads.

It was so sad seeing such a beautiful fish die so quickly. Next time we will be sure to be pickier  about the dragonet we purchase. We were told to also look for one with a “beer belly” which shows that he has had a healthy appetite and is not starving (which could make him prone to bacteria).

On a sidenote, Foxface is a quick study and by watching Iggy the first few days realized the little white things moving on the glass are edible. So yes, believe it or not, our Foxface now eats copepods. Suck. I wouldn’t normally care but we don’t want any future dragonet to compete for food. Stupid…smart Foxface.

 

This is the third day after we purchased him

Only a few days later.

After the second dip we placed him into the sump.

 

This was about three or so days before death.