Why are my captive oamas dying?

The oamas I caught early in the season lived in plastic tubs with external filtration for as long as 4 weeks.  Eventually all the tubs had bouts of mass die offs and now I’m leery about risking losing another batch.

 

 

To avoid putting all my oamas in one basket, so to speak, I now have them spread across 5 gallon buckets.  The oamas haven’t experienced mass die offs in the buckets, but  aren’t happy either and haven’t been eating.

I suspect some disease like “marine ich” is eventually spreading and reproducing in the tubs, and also believe the dying oamas emit some kind of toxic chemical that causes the others to die within minutes.  This is the dark side of oama raising I guess.

I’ve treated some of the tubs for “marine ich” with some success, and try to pull dying oamas out before they can affect the others.  If you have any additional advice please contact me.  It’s very sad and frustrating to try to keep the little guys long enough to use them, only to lose a bunch over night.

Update – 9/12/2014 :  Per the nice folks at Coral Fish Hawaii, I treated a few tubs and sick fish with copper.  If I caught the ich early enough, the fish made a complete recovery, and the tubs have hosted fish without killing them.  Keeping the oxygen infusion up seems to be more important than stabilizing the water temperature and salinity.