Parasites under Microscope Please can someone ID these

Ishy · Jan 29, 2018

Christoph said:
Amyloodinium can be a very fast killer, but the letality/"virulence" depends on many factors. For example nutrition and the overall state of health of the fish is a key player here. Also some species are more prone to infection than others.

Furthermore if you run a UV-C unit it is likely to keep the amount of infective stages at bay. I have seen tanks where only few fish were affected from a velvet outbreak while in others the outbreak had devastating effect on the whole fish population within a short time frame. I believe that there is differences in "agressiveness" of certain strains of amyloodinium and literature also suggests that fish can obtain a certain amount of immunity against those parasites.

In my opinion you are having two options

a) separating the fish and treating with a medication that is proven effective (chloroquine or copper), letting the display tank run fallow to starve out remaining parasites

b) letting things run its course, support the fish with excellent and frequent food, little stress and a powerful UV-C sanitizer.

I dont want to give you a certain recommendation to choose option A or B, its a heavily debated topic here on R2R. - I guess its best to do a lot of reading and choose the option you feel most comfortable with.

Did you see any fatalities in your fish yet? Do you have the feeling the disease is progressing (getting worse every day)? How is the beathing rate of the fish, do they seem to have troubles getting sufficient oxygen?

All the best, and keep us updated!
Christoph

Hi Christoph
That does explain alot , my wife has said all along it looks like velvet on the fish but thought it couldn't be as they weren't dead. I always thought that velvet would certainly kill them all and fast.
We have a Troptronic 85w UV running 24 / 7 . The spots has been progressively getting worse over the last 9 weeks . We have just removed the White cheek tang as he was causing some stress in the tank. He's gone into a friends qt and won't be coming back.
The Mimic is very pale and now hiding away when shes not in the power head, the first few hours of lights up seem to be the worst, but then I don't see what they do during the night. They are not gasping nor appear to be struggling for air. This in the power head symptom only started in the last week. The 2 neon gobies died Friday but that maybe unrelated (age ).
The fish are probably too fat to be honest but maybe that whats helped, we feed live, flake, pellet and frozen.
For the moment I can't go fallow but I was thinking now we removed the stressy fish, we should do a Fresh water dip, 60 minute bath in Paraguard, then into salt water tank with API Stress coat then back in the display ( or will the Paraguard be enough ? ).
We'll monitor from there , these fish were taken over from their old system by TTM but that doesn't cover velvet.
Thanks

Christoph · Jan 29, 2018

Hi,
yes, your strong uv-c is helping you a lot here, that explains the slow progression. Anyway the fact that the disease seems to worsen over time worries me a bit, and i would set up a hospital tank to treat the fishes as soon as rapid breathing adds to the list of symptoms.

Its for sure a good thing you removed the agressor from the fish society, maybe now things turn around. I m crossing my fingers! Regarding your planned dip-treatment, im a bit skeptic:

The dips are likely to remove the majority of oodinium from the fish, but on the other hand catching the fish (and the whole dipping procedure) will add a lot of stress to your fishes which is likely to diminish their immune system. If you then return the dipped fish into the tank with dinospores its possible that the whole procedure turns out actually negative to your fish.

I personally would only dip them if you could afterwards transfer them into a parasite-free environment. But in such situations its very hard to give "good" advince, so this is just my very personal point of view. @Humblefish, what would you suggest here?

All the best,
Christoph

Humblefish · Jan 29, 2018

From my way of thinking, ich is a manageable problem (for most species) but velvet is not. It sounds like you are slowly losing this battle even with the UV running. And what would happen if the UV pump suddenly stopped working? It might take you a few days to receive a new impeller or some other part. That would be disastrous.

I personally would take this opportunity to eliminate the problem before it spirals out of control, by doing the following:

5 min FW dip (will eliminate 80-90% of the trophonts on the fish): https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/freshwater-dip.248898/
90 min Acriflavine bath (antiseptic bath to ward off possible infection): https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/acriflavine.282887/
Into QT, and treat with copper or Chloroquine for 30 days.
Fallow the DT for 6 weeks (for velvet); 76 days if you also want to eliminate ich.

I would FW dip/chemical bath the fish one at a time (due to oxygen concerns), and do both en route to QT. You want the fish to have a "clean slate" in QT, so you can take a full 48 hrs to raise copper to full therapeutic.

Manics1 · Feb 9, 2018

Ishy. Just a suggestion......
I've had parasite issues and fish losses in the display whilst running a correctly sized uv at the correct flow rate, sadly the uv was in the sump, not all the parasites got down the overflow to the sump. I set up the uv perched on top of the tank, supply pump was hovering just over the sand. With this set up l had no more fatalities....
Mike

Ishy · Feb 9, 2018

Manics1 said:
Ishy. Just a suggestion......
I've had parasite issues and fish losses in the display whilst running a correctly sized uv at the correct flow rate, sadly the uv was in the sump, not all the parasites got down the overflow to the sump. I set up the uv perched on top of the tank, supply pump was hovering just over the sand. With this set up l had no more fatalities....
Mike

Yes I understand exactly where you are coming from and have considered this before but I am struggling with a way of making this a permanent out of tank fixture and a visually acceptable solution.
Thanks for the input.