After the dust cleared and the Methylene Blue faded, everything cleared up and things were great, aside from the near-death of my dwarf lily and a couple of my aponogetons. (The Amazon sword plant in there came through it awesomely, though.) For like a week. Then, Darrell #1 (Even if he's the only Darrell left, I'm keeping him numbered. I'm planning on the next tiger barb I get to be named Darrell #4, for the record.) started getting all white-spotty and eye-bloaty again, and in my frustration, I tried a bold new approach. I did absolutely goddamn nothing. I just let things go. And in the end, my gambit worked: After the initial disease breakout, I'm pretty sure the subsequent infections were sped along by stress from the tank's biological filter being killed graveyard-dead by all the antibiotics. So I just kept my water changes going, added some occasional Prime to neutralize the ammonia, and let the tank cycle again. Once the water stopped being cloudy, so did the fish. Larry and Darrell are as good as they've ever been, and it's all due to a strict regimen of medicinal neglect.
And it's kind of funny, because Barbs are usually the most gangster of small freshwater fish. I mean, they don't have the firepower to just chomp their neighbors in half, like an Oscar or something, but they will fin-nip each other and their tankmates into oblivion in the wrong conditions. Like they even tell you to keep tiger barbs in odd numbers, so that the odd fish out can hide and rest while the other even-numbered ones are bitch-slapping each other. But Larry and Darrell seems to be the best of pals now, even after Larry was a fucking bully to all the Darrells in the pre-columnaris era. I'm guessing it's because they've been to hell and back together, and have that same sort of bond that crippled Vietnam dudes have. Like I'll get a couple new barbs someday, and those two will swim up to them and be all "You wouldn't understand, because you weren't there! WE'VE SEEN SOME SHIT, MAAAAAAAAAAN." At least that's how I imagine it. In reality, they have brains the size of the head of a pin and just have thoughts like, "bubbles... bubbles... bubbles... food. Foooood, foodfoodfoodfood... bubbles..." But whatever. I got my fish back, and that's what matters.
