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Mugster
May 17th, 2002, 06:36 PM
Up until about a week ago my leather was doing fabulous. Always open and fully extended. One day last week I noticed what looks like large pieces of fish feces (for lack of a better description) on top of the leather. It stopped opening for a few days and when it did, I noticed where the forgein objects were sitting there now is a ulcerous cavity. Is this some sort of disease or infection, or is this normal? No noticeable changes in the params. Any help would be appreciated.

TIA,
Kev
Greg Moore
May 17th, 2002, 08:21 PM
Leathers can do some pretty strange things including closing up for days, sometimes weeks. The 'cavities' however are a really bad sign and generally mean some form of infection or rot and a pending death.

Keep a real close eye on it, these decaying areas may take a couple of weeks to spread a lot. If you see that they are definatly spreading (more then 1/4 consumed) then radical cutting would be your best bet to salvage peices of it..

Greg Moore
stephane
May 18th, 2002, 01:35 AM
get them more current , a bit of iodine or lugol in the tank will not hurt, water change could help + get your hand of and dont stess it
Mugster
May 18th, 2002, 01:35 AM
Greg, thanks for the info. My LFS suggested increasing the flow to help the leather clear the affected area. Would it not be better to use a hose and syphon off decaying/infected matter rather than just blowing it around the tank?

When you say "radical cutting", do you mean actually cutting out good pieces? I've seen my LFS "tear" out chunks and anchor them in the LR, eventually growing a new leather. Is there a preferable way of doing this? I would to keep as much of it alive as possible being as I've had it for close to two years now.

One thing I am curious about is what caused this. About a year and a half ago I had another leather approx. the same size. Shortly after spawning 2 "daughters" it developed the same affliction and subsequently died. Now once again, this leather has recently spawned a "daughter" and it too seems to be dieing.


Kev
stephane
May 18th, 2002, 01:45 AM
most of the time water quality is the problem so even cutting it will hurt more than other

but I just dont know about your set up and maitenance so it is very hard to figure exacly what happend but most of the time problem like this happend when water is not at 100%

Good luck!