Help with Black Bugs

Allyboy21

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Hello everyone,

I have a 150 gallons mixed reef majorly acropora dominated which is up and running for close to 1.5 years now. Everything was going fine with beautifully growing Acro colonies until a month back i saw a few STN happening on 2 of my acropora corals primary strawberry shortcake & the firework acropora corals. At the beginning I panicked and thought of some parameter issue as my trident controlled dosing had an issue (rectified in 2 days) and the alk had a swing for 2-3 days. But when the STN started increasing with stable parameters i started taking a deeper & closer look at nights and thats when I got a shock of my life in the form of tiny black stuff on the the base of the acros under STN. Took a closer look and realised the inevitable - Black Bugs (M sure it is). I swung into action and removed all the colonies for dip in red sea x with 3x the normal dosing post which saw quite a lot of bugs falling off. But I guess that wasn't enough as the bugs returned in greater numbers which would be due to eggs or the bugs already established well enough in the tank. In a span of 3 weeks I've lost quite a lot of acropora colonies and racing to save the remaining. After reading for a while, took the step to dose the tank with Interceptor Plus with a goal to have the dosage over a period of 4 weeks i.e. once every 7 days. I did the first treatment with 1 tab of interceptor plus for large dogs (50.1 - 100lbs) after removing carbon, phosphate and switching off the skimmer airline. The tablet was crushed and added to 1 litre of tank water, mixed nicely and poured in the tank followed by a large water 24 hours later. Was disappointed as barring the copepods there was no affect on the black bugs. I did another treatment similar to the first one but this time added 2 crushed tablets instead of one. I was fearful there will an impact on the corals however no impact on the corals but again no impact to the black bugs. Infact i now see quite a lot of blacks bugs as if they are now multiplying with vengeance.

Need help on how do i tackle or what next do i do to get these pests out & save my acropora. FYI - I have also seen an impact on LPS especially hammer corals that i lost since this started though not sure if that too was due to the bugs or something else

My current tank parameters
PH - 8.3 to 8.35
Alk - 8.40
Calcium - 420-440
Magnesium - 1380
Nitrate - 12-20ppm
Phosphate - 0.06ppm

I have attached pics of the Interceptor Plus medicine as well as one of the affected coral

acroproa affected.JPG interceptor.jpeg
 

sculpin01

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If you can capture some of the bugs and take a picture of them with a microscope, it’ll be a lot easier to know how to treat them. I suspect this variety of “bug” is a macroscopic protozoan and thus unlikely to respond to treatments designed for copepod parasites (e.g. interceptor).
 
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Allyboy21

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Sorry about the black bugs. Im curious as to how you think you got them?
Well would say bad luck and bad timing… usually dip and quarantine all my corals except that 1 acro which was dipped but not quarantine though well inspected… that’s the only thing I can recall…
 
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