Brookster123
Aquarium Advice Addict
Could you manually inject substrate with a large syringe??
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G900A using Aquarium Advice mobile app
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G900A using Aquarium Advice mobile app
the idea (as some have said elsewhere) of doing 90-100% water changes every few days just isn't going to happen either.
Could you manually inject substrate with a large syringe??
Some people advocate changing water daily to siphon out as much of the invisible worm eggs as possible, but you don't really have to worry about the eggs if all the larva will die from the medicine anyway. Even if you could remove 99.999% of all eggs, that 0.001% of remaining eggs will just bring you back to square one if you do not adequately medicate. For this reason it is very important to medicate for a long time.
It's too hard to distribute the meds into every nook and cranny. A piece of driftwood alone has hundreds if not thousands of deep microscopic crevices.
The larva will eventually look for a fish host to colonize. When they begin to swim around the tank, the medication will kill them.
The dose I use for fenbendazole is as follows:
Goat dewormer solution is 100mg/ml solution, which is basically equal to 0.1 gram/ml.
Start treatment at 0.5ml per 10 gallons. After 2 or 3 days increase to 1ml per 10 gallons by adding more fenbendazole.
What I haven't been able to figure out though, and relevant, is whether these medicines actually kill them... is it the larva stage it kills? Stuns the adults so they disconnect?
Would increasing tank temp speed that up?
I want to make sure I followed this. The 0.5ml/10G in the second paragraph refers to 0.5ml of the 10% (100mg/ml) solution, correct?
So it is approximately 50mg/10G of fenbendazole itself, or for 200G which is about a gram total first does, and 2-3 days later another 1 gram for a total of 2 grams.
Now that begs the question: A lot I read says this must be ingested not just in the water column.
Since I have levamisole on order, what I'm thinking of doing is using the above as a maximum-in-water, stay well under it but dose in food for now, and use the levamisole for the water column at it's full dosage, and hope they two don't conflict.
Here is what I am doing. If someone in the future is reading this, skip to the end and see if it says "and then all the fish died" before you pay any attention.
I bought horse size dewormer, 25g of 10% fenbendazole, which comes as a thin white paste (it treats an 1100 pound horse by the way).
I started with about 5g of the paste (so 500mg of fenbendazole), and mixed it up in about 50ml of water, basically just to get it really thin not for a particular dilution.
I then added some pellet food (maybe 3ml), 4 algae tablets, and a block of frozen bloodworms, stirred thoroughly and let it soak for an hour. It took up maybe a third of the water.
I then used a spoon to put it into the tanks, which hadn't been fed in 1.5 days, so everyone was hungry, at least those that usually come out for food. I put it in with the liquid, a little at a time to encourage it to be eaten (the algae tablets just fell to the bottom of course). It apparently didn't affect the taste negatively, as everyone ate quickly. I did it over 10 minutes or so, trying to get most of it eaten as opposed to sinking; I think most was, but not nearly all, so there's some left for the pleco and cat fish.
This made the water quite cloudy, but that didn't seem to affect the fishes ability to eat.
This went into two tanks, totaling about 240 gallons +/-. If my math is rather that put about .54 mg / L into the water so far.
I plan to do it again tomorrow and the next day so most of it gets eaten. I'll use less water then, I think this was a bit too dilute. By that time I hope to have Levamisole, and will make up a bath, depending on how the fish are doing. May give them a day in between.
Comments welcome if this is very off base.
Two specific questions if anyone knows:
1) I have purigen in the filters. I've heard it doesn't impact most medicines, unlike carbon. Anyone know? I'm actually not sure I care if it absorbs the fenbendazole, as I really want it ingested, but how about the levamisole?
2) I have low power UV sanitizers in the filters (they are SunSun 404B). I'm sure they are little help with the parasites, though who knows, maybe they are getting a sunburn. Will it impact the medicine though?
Always remove carbon and purigen when medicating. Personally I think both carbon and purigen are non-essential items. Frequent large water changes will do a better job than purigen and carbon combined, but that is another debate for a different day.
...
Always turn off UV sterilizers when medicating. Even if the drug is not light sensitive, a UV bulb may break down the chemicals. The "weak" Sunsun UV light is actually very powerful. Do not be deceived by the low wattage. 9 watts is enough to kill green water algae and is the same wattage used in 2,000-gallon pond UV sterilizers!!!
Search for "tetra pond UV" in Amazon dot com.
Since you have a worm problem despite using a UV sterilizer, we can probably conclude that the sterilizer is not effective in eradicating the worms.
The water was clear this morning, it must settle quickly, or come out in the filters. Fish are all still alive, the shrimp (ghost) look a bit quiet but alive. And the worms are still visible just as before. Another dose this afternoon.
I found this informational:
Camallanus worms
Out of curiosity, where do you think you acquired these worms?