coral reef disease???

[kellane1]

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ok all. I have a 210gallon tank that has been running about three months now, inhabitants are a long nose butterfly, a dottyback, various live rock critters, several sponges and about 80 pounds of live rock.
Appox three weeks ago i decided to change from [acronym:8eee7469cf="Crushed Coral (if substrate) or Counter Current (if referring to a Protien skimmer) or cubic centimeter (if referring to a measure of volume)."]CC[/acronym:8eee7469cf] to a [acronym:8eee7469cf="Deep Sand Bed"]DSB[/acronym:8eee7469cf], after a back breaking day this was achieved and am very happy with the result..
Now to the problem, just after the change i noticed that my long nosed butterfly, (for this topic, now to be known as the LNB.) had a couple of pin head sized black dots on his tail fins, this progessed on the LNB until they seemed to grow up his clear tail fins, sort of like lines.. Then i noticed that he seemed to have some salt looking crystals on his body, (very noticeable with just the actincs on) this has progressed until he is now covered in the salt crystal things, this accompanied rapid breathing and loss of appetite. He has now recovered his appetite and is breathing much easier but the salt things are still there.
I netted him this afternoon and removed a reddy black egg thing from him about the size of a ball point pen tip. It squashed easily and a sort of bloody substance came out.
Since this all started to happen I have only added the sand and some more live rock, did not quarantine either of them.
If this is coral reef disease, I thought you could only get it from infected fish introduced to the tank, and I have not put any in!~!~
So the questions are this, Can he recover without treatment, I would find it hard where i live to get copper and a copper tester. If he dies(please no) how long before i can add more fish to the tank, ie quarantine period.
Will he affect my dotty back and is there any way i can fix him quickly.
Any advice will be greatly appreciated as he is my mate and the founding member of my tank..
kindest regards kell

Actually it does sound like it could be Amyloodinium. If so, it will not recover without treatment. I would suggest you treat both fish in a proper >>quarantine<< set up. >>Cupramine<< would be the best bet. The copper level would need to be maintained for about 21 days in order to interupt the life cycle completely and Cupramine has shown to be the least stressful and not nearly as damaging as most freely ionic copper meds.

I netted him this afternoon and removed a reddy black egg thing from him about the size of a ball point pen tip. It squashed easily and a sort of bloody substance came out.

I would suggest you also look into the possibility of turbellarian worms.

Once both fish are removed from the display, the main tank needs to remain fallow for 4-6 weeks.

Cheers
Steve