Bryopsis Cure: My Battle With Bryopsis Using Fluconazole

[ReefStash]

Tried raising magnesium with Hydrat-MG to 1700+ to kill off some bryopsis in the tank and that didn’t work.

Found this thread and looking for product recommendations to dose Fluconazole???

What US product is everyone using? Thx in advance.

 

[taulgrl]

Tried raising magnesium with Hydrat-MG to 1700+ to kill off some bryopsis in the tank and that didn’t work.

Found this thread and looking for product recommendations to dose Fluconazole???

What US product is everyone using? Thx in advance.

Reef Flux. Most LFS and Amazon carry

 

[Swede Reef]

Just dosed half dose of reef flux 2 days ago to combat bryopsis. Started to turn white grayish day 2. The thing I noticed so far, clowns started spawning. Corals look very happy so far and cuc started eating hair algea... so far so good.... Tank about 1.5 yrs so not quite " mature" yet.

 

[OscarHaglund]

Im curious about these continuously 5-20% dose instances. Do these run with a skimmer on? If so, will it not skim out the fluc? If not, why do we need to shut off the skimmer for the initial dose? It seems inconsistent

 

[waitwut]

Coming up to 3 weeks after dosing the Fluconazole. It's decimated the bryopsis - there's some stubborn patches here and there on the rocks but the snails are slowly cleaning those up.

Anecdotally - it seems everything in the tank has tolerated it just fine except my brittle stars. I have a new large fancy serpent star which has been under a rock curling up in strange and freaky ways for the last week and a half. Admittedly that could just be acclimation issues but I was just cleaning up my refugium and noticed that the mini brittle star population in there has crashed completely.

Previously when I pulled out my chaeto there was dozens of brittle stars in it but now I could only find two or three! Has anyone else observed this? Everything else seems fine - including my urchin which seems totally healthy and happy.

I've thrown in carbon and purigen to start stripping out the fluconazole and I'm prepping a large water change. Hopefully the bryopsis is sufficiently under control now but I don't want to kill the poor serpent star for some algae!

 

[Bo2022]

I asked my doc for prescriptions, but he can only get me Fluconazole 100mg in tablet pills not capsules. And the tablet is in pink color instead of white. Can it still be used in the tank? I have no idea why it’s pink. I mashed it into powder but still don’t feel safe to use it since it’s a different color, can anybody tell me if it’s safe to use it in pink or no.

 

[starrynight99]

Sharing my experience with fluconazole and bryopsis. We've had a few fatalities and I couldn't say for sure that it is related to the fluconazole but prior to fluconazole, they had been fine for many months. I used human grade fluconazole that was purchased from the pharmacy.

Almost 15 days into fluconazole treatmentt-bryopsis is all gone. GHA, still here but some are easier to suction out then others. We lost a lineatus wrasse several days into treatment, it was out of no blue, previously eating well and fat.

Since then, we've also lost a big hammer and a frogspawn is looking very bad. However, lots of other hammers and torches are unaffected. I would say all other corals are fine (zoas, SPS, acans, lobos, scolys) and inverts are fine, fish are fine.

Parameters are all within the normal range.

 

[CoralB]

Sharing my experience with fluconazole and bryopsis. We've had a few fatalities and I couldn't say for sure that it is related to the fluconazole but prior to fluconazole, they had been fine for many months. I used human grade fluconazole that was purchased from the pharmacy.

Almost 15 days into fluconazole treatmentt-bryopsis is all gone. GHA, still here but some are easier to suction out then others. We lost a lineatus wrasse several days into treatment, it was out of no blue, previously eating well and fat.

Since then, we've also lost a big hammer and a frogspawn is looking very bad. However, lots of other hammers and torches are unaffected. I would say all other corals are fine (zoas, SPS, acans, lobos, scolys) and inverts are fine, fish are fine.

Parameters are all within the normal range.

Maybe it’s the dose and human grade aspect . I’ve used fluxrx from the lfs a few times throughout the years and never had losses . I found that it worked as good as claimed . Maybe with the the human grade is too pure I don’t know

 

[PeterEde]

The only real issue I've had since cycling was bryopsis. Used fluc at ½ recommend dose and not seen bryopsis since

 

[Alex.qld]

Thank you very much for sharing this information. In the last few weeks my tank has been taken over by briopsis. I had been over feeding my lps and it les to this outbreak. It is visibility harming the corals and i lost a couple frags.

I have removed some of the algae biomass by sucking it out with a water change, removed carbon and left the skimmer on without its cup then added 450 mg of medical Fluconazole in around 900-950l of water (including sump)
I’ll document the progress here

Fingers crossed… its always a worry to add something new

 

[Narideth]

I didn't even realize I had bryopsis for a long time. I didn't know what it was, I just thought the first tank I'd ever set up had imbalances that needed to work themselves out with time and maturity. I stripped algae out frequently, I limited feeding and it still covered -everything- for months and months.

I finally went nuclear after two years of the tank being up and took out and stripped and then peroxide sprayed Every. Single. Rock. I wasn't too upset with this, I had been wanting to re-scape that tank for a while so it was two in one.

It came back. I was just lucky to have been perusing and finally wondered what this bryopsis I'd seen on the forums even -was- and that there was something else I could try. I'm on the third week of the first normal dose and happy to say that it has almost completely melted away. My urchins and snails have been stripping the weakened algae from the rocks, my parameters are good. I've been keeping an eye on the nitrates in particular but I think since I had previously taken out everything that the biomass wasn't exceedingly high like it would have been if I waited longer for it to grow out.

I used reef flux and not even my anemone has shown any signs of being effected. I'll be doing my first water change probably this weekend to start cycling it out.

 

[likvor]

Is Fish flux also acceptable as Reef Flux?

 

[Alex.qld]

Hello
I have not had great success with small dose fluconazole, which i did twice, once at 10% and once again at 75% of the recommended dose it made some of the algae go away, it then came back
I think it started coming back like crazy when i switched the skimmer back on - maybe a coincidence
I have a reef mat, and i wonder if some of it got filtered away, although this may also be wrong as it must be too small of a molecule once dissolved in water

Anyway, this algae is killing all small frags and i need to step up management

could you please help me ID / confirm this is bryopsis - i thought there were feather-like structures, less so now that it is growing back

thanks
Alex

 

[Vince Reef]

Hi everyone. I am currently treating fluconazole and I wanted to know if the addition of bacteria during treatment would decrease fluconazole or not

 

[Tritie]

Just getting ready to dose my tank tonight. I've done a peroxide pre-scrub on most of my rocks to remove some bryopsis. I have a rock that has clownfish eggs that I would have liked to pretreat. It has some shaded areas with some bryopsis down near the sand bed and close to the glass, so I'm going to tape a spare FS fuge light there to illuminate it a bit more. Fingers crossed this works without taking out any livestock.

 

[Tritie]

Hi, I have a serius Algea problem in my tank. I want to try the Fluconazole. But here in Québec, Canada one pill is 20$ca. Somone can get a bottle of 100 for me and ship it?

Go to Big Show Frags website.

 

[Jimbo327]

I think it was mentioned that UV doesn't really impact fluconazole too much. But what about ozone? Does ozone degrade fluconazole quickly?

 

[leviticus]

I have had good luck using Reef Flux - Fluconazole. My rocks where completely covered in Algae. It took about 3 weeks to really see an improvement. It nice to see the Algae turn white and fade away.

 

[leviticus]

I removed my filter socks, shut off UV, shut off Protein Skimmer. I waited 3 weeks on a water change. Not sure all of this is necessary though.

 

[leviticus]

I forgot about the Carbon Reactor. I leave my GFO / Carbon off all 3 weeks as well.