My struggle with Velvet, and Peroxide as a promising tool

[Sashaka]

Visual Diary of H202 Dosing in 180 Gallon Saltwater FOWLR Tank (page 21)
Update: Day 34

I dosed 3/4 cup or 177.441 ml, close to 1 ml per gal., both morning and evening. The moyer's wrasse was not up this morning when I left for work, but all other fish were present and eating except the yellow tang, which picked at but didn't really eat much of anything during the morning feeding. She did, however, eat well for dinner! She was even out swimming around a bit. She's so paper thin. I can't believe she's hung in there so long. The moyer's wrasse is still a no show for the evening feeding. Maybe it went to bed early? I did get home earlier tonight, so I expected to see it. With lights out in the tank right now because of the dosing, it may have its internal clock all messed up. I'll watch for it again tomorrow.

 

[Sashaka]

Visual Diary of H202 Dosing in 180 Gallon Saltwater FOWLR Tank (page 22)
Update: Day 36

Negative to report: I was running late for work yesterday, so I forgot to dose the tank for the morning dose! Dang! I can't wait to get the doser in. It's scheduled to come today. I don't usually get Saturday FedEx deliveries because I'm in the boonies, so I probably won't see it until Monday.

A positive to report: In spite of forgetting to dose (or because of?), the yellow tang ate with gusto last night! If it continues to eat like this, I'm hopeful it will be able to bounce back from the brink of death a second time!

Comparatively, the first round of dosing a month ago was administered to the tank at the highest amount or about 75 ppm for two days, and then the dose was dropped to 5 cups or somewhere around 50 ppm. I believe it was three days in at this schedule that the yellow tang started eating.

This time around the yellow tang took more like a week to start eating. On day one, I started with the higher dose of about 75ppm H202 with the intent to hit the pathogen hard with the initial dose, and then I quickly dialed it down to protect my cycle. On days two and three, I dropped the dose from 7.2 cups down to 4 cups. The yellow tang seemed interested when I added food to the tank at this point, but it was still not really eating. The tank cycle was effected at this dose. On day three I dosed 1 cup. The tang appeared to be picking at food, though I don't think it was still eating much.

On day 4, I dosed 3/4 cup or 177.441 ml or about 1 ml per gallon, and I've kept it at that dose (except for yesterday morning when I stupidly forgot to administer the morning H202 dose :mad. I'd say the yellow tang ate with gusto for the first time about a week into this schedule as apposed to about 3 or 4 days the first time around.

For me, the reduced dosing seems to be as effective as the higher doses, but it took a bit longer to see the same results as far as helping the fish feel well enough to eat again. A tentative conclusion... In a true emergency, and when dosed in a FOWLR tank with inverts removed, a higher initial dose to give quick relief to the fish seems safe enough for most fish, and lowering the dose to 1 ml per gal appears to be safe to continue working on controlling (and hopefully irradiating) pathogens in the MD.

All fish accounted for this morning, including the Moyeri and yellow wrasses that I keep missing because they get up after I leave for work and are usually in bed by the time I get home from work. The yellow wrasse seems a bit thinner and the Regal tang seems to hide more, but all are still eating. The yellow tang's respiration is still faster than normal, and it is still holding its dorsal fin tight (seems to do that when it does not feel well IMHO), but it is actively swimming about the tank now. No flashing observed so far this morning. It's a good day...so far.

Sorry about the bad pictures. I do the best I can.

 

[Sashaka]

Visual Diary of H202 Dosing in 180 Gallon Saltwater FOWLR Tank (page 23)
Update: Day 37

The doser came in and was setup. Nighttime dosing was started last night, Saturday. 15 ml starting at midnight and then 15 ml every 15 minutes until 6:45 am for a total of 24 doses during the night. I'm not sure if the hose in the tank delivering the dosages was too close to where the Regal tang sleeps, if the dose was too high, if the combination of both daytime and nighttime dosing was too much, or a combination of all of the above was the problem, but the Regal tang was a no show for breakfast this morning. She is a pig and never misses a feeding. This was completely off behavior for this fish. As a result, I did not dose the morning H202 3/4 cup dosage. I fed a small amount of food to the tank around 1: pm to see if the Regal would come out to eat and she remained a no show.

Around 7:30 pm when I would normally dose for the evening, the Regal was out. I fed the tank and she ate. I decided not to dose the 2nd daytime dose as well to give the Regal a little more time to recover from last night's dosing, but I left the doser up and running, so it will deliver the nighttime dosing as previous programmed tonight. I moved the H202 delivery hose closer to the front middle of the tank, further away from where the Regal tang sleeps. I am hopeful that this is a fix and I can start daytime dosing again tomorrow. If the tang does not come out to eat tomorrow morning, I will know it was not the position of the H202 delivery hose in the tank but the amount dosed during the night and I will reprogram the doser to deliver a greatly reduced amount for nighttime treatments.

 

[Sashaka]

Visual Diary of H202 Dosing in 180 Gallon Saltwater FOWLR Tank (page 24)
Update: Day 43

I have been dosing H202 all week at night as scheduled, but leaning toward the idea that I was dealing with flukes, I stopped dosing during the day to give the wrasses some relief. The H202 definitely irritates the wrasses. The yellow wrasse has been buried in the sand for two days without coming out to eat. While reducing the H202 dosing to just night dosing has helped the wrasses, it seems to have been the wrong thing to do for the yellow tang. I've had the tank in 15 ppt hyposalinity, which does not seem to give the tang the same relief that the H202 seems to do. Unfortunately, the yellow tang has stopped eating again and does not look like she will make it. If I can catch the yellow tang tomorrow, I will put it in the sick tank with the puffer and dose them both with CP.

I believe the H202 dosing was the reason the yellow tang bounced back enough to start eating again, twice; however, reducing H202 allows the pathogen to come back in force, at least for the yellow tang. I have lowered salinity to .09 as @Humblefish suggested allowing some wiggle room for evaporation if I am dealing with flukes, and I will run it at this level for another week. At that point, I'll do the black molly test and hold my breath, watching the tank, and praying that the nightmare is over.

If the yellow tang dies (I doubt it's strong enough to go through CP or copper at this point), I'll try to get some cultures under the microscope.

 

[Sashaka]

isual Diary of H202 Dosing in 180 Gallon Saltwater FOWLR Tank (page 24)
Update: one month later

The yellow tang is still alive, still very thin, still in quarantine. All H202 dosing has been discontinued now for about two weeks. The tank is slowly being brought back up to normal 35 ppt salinity from a hypo state. The yellow wrasse was spotted a few times, but it looks to have a severe infection. I was unable to catch it and it has gone back into the sand....missing now for a week.

All other fish continue to do well...no flashing, no outward signs of illness.

The tank does look like it is growing some form red algae or bacteria on a few rocks (not cyano), but nothing too serious at this point.

Future Plans: I am looking into the purchase of a UV for the system and as soon as it's in the budget, I'll be installing one.

 

[Cooter181]

Shashaka, your documentation of your process has been fantastic and priceless for many I'm sure!

I was able to successfully eradicate marine ich, brook and velvet with a 30 day treatment of 11 ppt hyposalinity and dual daily doses of H2O2 at 200ml of 3% HP. This all occurred in a 75 gallon aquarium with a 20 gallon sump, no invertebrates or corals. I used no other forms of filtration besides the rock and sand that were already in the tank, filter socks and protein skimming which did nothing more than aerate the water at 11 ppt salinity. I lost all 3 of my baby yellow wrasse', 1 pajama cardinal of 6, and my male saddleback clownfish lost one eye from the disease infection prior to dosing. My adult Melanarus wrasse never skipped a beat, my small Tomini tang did perfect and the female clownfish recovered perfectly as well. The bio filtration took a slight hit as treatment continued and I added Brightwells cycle bacteria twice throughout treatment to replenish it.

I wanted to wait for 30 days minimum after treatment had subsided and the salinity raised back to 35 ppt before reporting my experience with this treatment. There has been absolutely zero signs of disease in my tank to date.

Hopefully my experience will be helpful to someone who is contemplating attempting this themselves.

 

[Cooter181]

After having success with my tank, I decided to setup a 40 gallon breeder with a Fiji Cube AIO setup and attempt eradicating disease from some new fish that I acquired at Petco and a LFS for this purpose. All 4 fish purchased had clear signs of disease and were not in good shape nutrition wise.

The fish purchased were:
2 small yellow wrasse'
1 tiny/small hippo tang
1 small yellow tang

All 4 fish were introduced to the cycled tank at 35ppt salinity. H2O2 dosing was began at day 3 after the fish were allowed to settle in a little. With the initial dose, the 2 yellow wrasse' hid in the sand almost immediately and remained there for 2 days. Both came out occasionally and ate periodically but would quickly return to the sand after eating. These 2 yellow wrasse' stopped coming out of the sand at around the 1 week mark and both expired within the next week. (Though it happened much faster this time, similar results were seen in my 75 gallon aquarium with these specific wrasse'. This response was not seen however in my Melanarus wrasse who did exceptional throughout the treatment.) To this point the yellow tang has done well, showing signs of relief from the disease but a stunted appetite, still out and swimming all day though. The hippo tang is not doing well, although outwardly he shows no sign of disease any longer, he will not eat at all any longer and does not swim properly either. He basically looks like a lawn dart with his nose on the sand and his tail straight up in the air/water. I'm not sure how related this is to the H2O2 treatment because he was in bad shape upon purchase and wedged into a rock for several days after introduction to the 40 breeder.

Hopefully I will have 2 more fish successfully treated with this method in the future and will report my findings at the end.

 

[mpjones]

It takes dosing H2O2 every 12 hours for 30 days to have a chance (not guaranteed) of complete eradication. 1 ml per 10 gallons. The upside is H2O2 at this dosage/duration appears to be reef safe. Even acros tolerate it well.

What percentage of hydrogen peroxide to utilize 1 ml per 10 gallons?

 

[jasonrusso]

Visual Diary of H202 Dosing in 180 Gallon Saltwater FOWLR Tank (page 22)
Update: Day 36

Negative to report: I was running late for work yesterday, so I forgot to dose the tank for the morning dose! Dang! I can't wait to get the doser in. It's scheduled to come today. I don't usually get Saturday FedEx deliveries because I'm in the boonies, so I probably won't see it until Monday.

A positive to report: In spite of forgetting to dose (or because of?), the yellow tang ate with gusto last night! If it continues to eat like this, I'm hopeful it will be able to bounce back from the brink of death a second time!

Comparatively, the first round of dosing a month ago was administered to the tank at the highest amount or about 75 ppm for two days, and then the dose was dropped to 5 cups or somewhere around 50 ppm. I believe it was three days in at this schedule that the yellow tang started eating.

This time around the yellow tang took more like a week to start eating. On day one, I started with the higher dose of about 75ppm H202 with the intent to hit the pathogen hard with the initial dose, and then I quickly dialed it down to protect my cycle. On days two and three, I dropped the dose from 7.2 cups down to 4 cups. The yellow tang seemed interested when I added food to the tank at this point, but it was still not really eating. The tank cycle was effected at this dose. On day three I dosed 1 cup. The tang appeared to be picking at food, though I don't think it was still eating much.

On day 4, I dosed 3/4 cup or 177.441 ml or about 1 ml per gallon, and I've kept it at that dose (except for yesterday morning when I stupidly forgot to administer the morning H202 dose :mad. I'd say the yellow tang ate with gusto for the first time about a week into this schedule as apposed to about 3 or 4 days the first time around.

For me, the reduced dosing seems to be as effective as the higher doses, but it took a bit longer to see the same results as far as helping the fish feel well enough to eat again. A tentative conclusion... In a true emergency, and when dosed in a FOWLR tank with inverts removed, a higher initial dose to give quick relief to the fish seems safe enough for most fish, and lowering the dose to 1 ml per gal appears to be safe to continue working on controlling (and hopefully irradiating) pathogens in the MD.

All fish accounted for this morning, including the Moyeri and yellow wrasses that I keep missing because they get up after I leave for work and are usually in bed by the time I get home from work. The yellow wrasse seems a bit thinner and the Regal tang seems to hide more, but all are still eating. The yellow tang's respiration is still faster than normal, and it is still holding its dorsal fin tight (seems to do that when it does not feel well IMHO), but it is actively swimming about the tank now. No flashing observed so far this morning. It's a good day...so far.

Sorry about the bad pictures. I do the best I can.

I still can't believe that you were dosing that high. 1.5L of H2O2? Sounds crazy. I'm dosing 50ml three times a day then the 100ml for overnight dose.

 

[jasonrusso]

Let me lay some groundwork here regarding this post. I don't post often but I thought this was worth the time to give back a bit to the community. I am also NOT a scientist, I’m a hobbyist like most of you. My intent here is to share my experience, strictly for learning purposes, in the hopes that someday others benefit from and continue to look into this approach. I’m personally convinced it’s effective but it needs more research, and with CP and copper affecting various fish, this might be a gentler solution. At the very least, it could be a tool to give us a little more time to react since velvet moves so fast, so it’s worth a discussion IMO.

Tank Spec for the purpose of this conversation:
300 gallon (total water volume, including displacement for rock/sand/etc.) (96”x24”x30” + sump) reef tank.

So here we go... A few weeks ago I noticed a dead fish, my nice ORA indigo dottyback. He was a longtime resident and I was a bit concerned but saw no outward signs of disease and reconciled myself to “stuff happens”. The next day, my very healthy long time resident watanabe angel was gasping on the bottom of the tank. Something was definitely wrong.

I started really looking at all the fish in the tank, 15 in total. I saw what I tragically misinterpreted as ich and began aggressively taking my display down to hyposalinity and migrating my inverts to avoid a huge die-off send my tank into a new cycle.

It’s worth noting WHY I went down this road;
1. I could not easily treat 15 fish, some large 6+ inches with my current qt equipment
2. I had very little in the way of inverts/coral at the time and they could easily fit in a 40 breeder
3. I am in the middle of a minor renovation with floors for the entire house and a few walls going up so it would be chaotic, to say the least, to manage the multiple hospital tanks I would need.

OK, so back to it. It’s no surprise I lost a few more fish as I transitioned to hypo. Let me say that getting to 1.009sg on a 300 gallon tank is not easy. It took a few days, it involved a lot of buckets of RO. I lost a few more fish and then some of the signs of what I was truly dealing with became known to me.

Ich is not this fast, I knew that. I began more research and concluded it was velvet (Amyloodinium ocellatum). The signs were now easy to see. Fish swimming into powerheads, gasping, light sensitive, and lack of appetite were all there. And of course hypo does NOTHING for velvet, so I lost precious time going down the wrong road. Lesson learned.

Now I’m kind of of screwed because copper and Chloroquine Phosphate (CP) are the 2 main treatments and neither are going to work for a 300g tank.

First, I dont have access to CP, time is precious, and I have 2 wrasses, which don't do well in CP.
Second, copper would destroy my rocks and sand, it’s not a good solution for a DT.

Formalin is a third option but it isn’t a viable option for me either. With the tank in hypo I am seeing an ammonia spike from the die-off of worms and a few missed snails, its manageable with water changes and Prime but Formalin would have destroyed whatever biofilter that was protecting me currently.

So more research, there must be something else, right?

I started reading articles on some promising work with Hydrogen Peroxide (H2O2). I dove deeper and it seemed to make sense. Velvet is a dinoflagellate, we use Peroxide for other dinoflagellate issues and algae, so I read on;

A purple tang rescue with some peroxide testing:
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/petco-purple-tang-rescue-action.249943/page-2

A VERY informative article from Reefkeeping which included some peroxide info:
http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2004-07/sp/feature/index.php

Several articles that got a bit more specific on treatment options:
http://agrilife.org/fisheries/files...mportant-Parasite-of-Cultured-Marine-Fish.pdf

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2761.1980.tb00421.x

Im sure I read more than the above, but the bulk of information is in the articles I listed. Honestly, I was really surprised on how little info there was to read on the topic.

In the end, I learned that treatments ranging in the 50-300ppm had variable success/mortality rates with the most promising was in the 50-75ppm range, in my opinion. So I calculated my dosing, starting at the low end to see reactions. 50ppm.

I calculated what I needed as follows:
50ppm = .05 ml/l
300g = 1135.62 liters
1135.65 * .05 = 56.781 ml (I rounded to 57ml)

Prior to initial dosing the following notable symptoms were occuring:

1. My naso was noticeable covered in spots, was not eating and was photosensitive.
   
   
2. My copperband was swimming into the powerhead and staying at the top of the tank, also noticeably covered in spots.
   
   
3. My tomato clowns were further along, with large white mucus patches.
   
   
4. All fish were generally lacking in appetite.

Day 1 In the evening I dosed the 57ml into the main tank powerhead and watched for adverse reactions through the next day. The 3 fish I noted above were my litmus test, If I saw improvement in those 4, I would continue treatment.

Day 2, in the morning I observed some slight improvement, or what I perceived to be improvement in behavior. There were no adverse reactions, so I dosed another 57ml.

I continued to read some of the scientific research into Amyloodinium ocellatum because, aside from the issue at hand, this is a dang interesting parasite. One thing that popped into my head was that, as a dinoflagellate, it was photosynthetic and could use light for some nourishment. But what really struck me was that when Amyloodinium ocellatum reach the trophant stage, they tend to swim toward the light and then infect fish. Now I also started reading into the reaction times of peroxide, and how long it lasts in the water. As an oxidizer, its not long, a few hours by some estimates.

I decided I could turn this into an advantage in two ways. First, I surmised that if I treat with peroxide in the AM, maybe 30-40 min after lights come on, I could maximize the effect on the trophants, which is the only stage peroxide will work on btw. Second, given the lifespan of peroxide, I could possible double dose; once in the AM and once at night to further increase effectiveness.

Day 2, in the evening, with no losses or negative effects, I upped the dose to 75ppm (86ml), after the initial morning dose of 57ml. The next day, I saw very notable improvement. The naso was out and showing interest in food (but not eating yet), the clowns were still showing signs of white patches and lack of appetite, the remaining fish actually ate!!

Day 3, I continued the 86ml dose for both the morning and evening.

Each day, I saw some improvement and the appetite and behavior of the fish trended closer to normal. Except for the clowns, who died. I surmise, based on their advanced symptoms, were too far gone for this, or any other treatment, to help.

I continued the 86ml dosing over the next several days until all visible symptoms also disappeared. At this point, the fish are symptom free, I have stopped dosing 2 days ago and I am observing. I know this is not a definitive cure, I cannot perform a gill biopsy to confirm, and even if no further symptoms present themselves, I plan on doing a full quarantine after the renovations are complete before any new fish or coral will be considered. I am also upping my QT game for all additions; 6 weeks for everything, no exceptions. I am NOT doing this again, velvet is no joke.

So you were dosing at 57 to 86ml for a 300G tank. What was the interval? The other girl on here was dosing 1500ml from what I gather. Sounds crazy, but was it effective?

 

[jasonrusso]

I calculated what I needed as follows:
50ppm = .05 ml/l
300g = 1135.62 liters
1135.65 * .05 = 56.781 ml (I rounded to 57ml)

Again just trying to confirm that you were dosing in mL. You were no where near 75ppm.

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