wasp fish, frogfish and leaf fish

[puccie1]

are you able to use copper power to treat ick if they come down with it or is there a better way, Thanks

 

[vetteguy53081]

are you able to use copper power to treat ick if they come down with it or is there a better way, Thanks

Not safe for these fish however you can use General Cure or Chloroquine phosphate

 

[puccie1]

Not safe for these fish however you can use General Cure or Chloroquine phosphate

Dropping salt to 1.0 will that work

 

[vetteguy53081]

Dropping salt to 1.0 will that work

These fish dont do well as with most smaller fish in Hyposalinity.

 

[puccie1]

Thanks

 

[ISpeakForTheSeas]

are you able to use copper power to treat ick if they come down with it or is there a better way, Thanks

For marine ich, effective treatments are basically copper and hyposalinity - chloroquine phosphate can be used for at least some fish species, but Jay doesn't usually recommend it due to specific issues he's seen with it, and I'm not sure how well frogfish, wasp fish, or leaf fish would handle it (maybe @Jay Hemdal knows and would be willing to chime in here?).

Chloroquine phosphate:

I think your dose ended up higher than anticipated, chloroquine breaks down fairly slowly. I’m also not convinced that carbon removes it.

Here is my article on chloroquine. I don’t recommend it much anymore due to ammonia spikes and odd mortality events.

Aquarium Fish: Chloroquine: A “New” Drug for Treating Fish Diseases

While not a panacea or miracle drug, chloroquine is experiencing resurgence in popularity for use in fish-only aquariums and quarantine systems to treat a variety of problems ranging from Cryptocaryon to Aiptasia anemone infestations.

reefs.com

That’s the problem with chloroquine - fish toxicity shows up around 20 ppm, but 15 ppm doesn’t always control active ich infections.

General Cure (or Prazipro and Metroplex separately) treats for flukes and other internal parasites; I haven't heard of any issues with these for frogfish or other predators that I recall, so unless Jay suggests otherwise, I would assume these would be fine to treat with:

Metro is effective against protozoans, not worms. Praziquantel is effective against tapeworms. So - General Cure, containing both, is one product you could consider. However, that doesn’t treat nematodes. Fenbendazole can help with those, but it is toxic to some species and I’ve never used it on lionfish.

General Cure (GC): The problem with GC is that metronidazole and PZQ have different dosing schedules! Metro is 25 mg/l every other day for three treatments and PZQ is 2.2 mg/l every 5 to 8 days for three treatments. The metronidazole component is also NOT reef safe. Do not use this product in oral formulations, as the oral dose for these two medications are different and cannot be combined.

Prazi use:

Prazi (the QT protocol goes into more detail on this):
Dose the amount recommended on the medicine label; you'll want to dose two or three times (three to be safe) with each dose being eight days apart - ensure the tank has plenty of aeration for this treatment.

Current Quarantine Protocol

2024 Quarantine Procedures Jay Hemdal David Scarborough Protozoans (Cryptocaryon/ich, Amyloodinium/velvet) and Metazoan trematodes/flukes are by far the most common parasites found on newly acquired fish. A carefully managed, proactive quarantine process can effectively eliminate these...

www.reef2reef.com

Metroplex use: the dosage should be on the package, but it's usually recommended to dose into the water (note* metro is not safe for invertebrates, so just use it in water with fish) rather than in food (though if going the food route, making a gelatin feed with it is preferred, and the dose should be 1% by weight):

Proper Dosing of Medicated Foods

Proper Dosing of Medicated Foods Jay Hemdal c. 2020 Oral medications are an excellent way to target internal diseases of fishes. Marine fish absorb aquarium water, so in certain cases, they “drink” enough medication from the water to effect a cure. However, freshwater fish actively export...

www.reef2reef.com

Fish Weight Calculator / Medicated Fish Food Mix Calculator

If you follow threads on the Fish Disease Treatment and Diagnosis forum, you know that whenever oral medication is the recommended treatment, @Jay Hemdal cautions that achieving the proper dosage is critical to success. He often refers to his article Proper Dosing of Medicated Foods. That...

www.reef2reef.com

Regarding copper use for frogfish:

Frogfish are really succeptable to ich, but it is really difficult to see it on them. I've also had difficulty treating frogfish...they handle copper o.k., but perhaps because they have thick mucus, the copper treatments don't work well on them.

Treatment guidelines (copper and hyposalinity):

if you want to treat ich effectively, you need either copper medication (chelated copper like Coppersafe or Copper Power at 2.25-2.5ppm for 30 days after the last ich trophonts disappear is recommended) or hyposalinity (drop your salinity to 1.009 and keep the tank at that salinity for 30 days after the last signs/symptoms of the disease disappear), neither of which are reef-safe. There is no effective, reef-safe treatment for ich at the moment (at least not one that I've heard of).

Copper dosing info:

Like Sharkbait19 said ~1.4 mL per gallon.

Taken from BRS here:

"1.475 mL per gallon = 2.5 ppm"

Copper Power Parasite Treatment

Thanks to its special formulation, Copper Power is one of the safest and yet most effective copper solutions for treatment of external parasites, such as ich and velvet. Copper Power contains a very stable form of copper medication with low levels of precipitation, and thanks to this it is able...

www.bulkreefsupply.com

Edit: To add: each 0.1 ppm would be 0.059 mL/gal.

(Also, for anyone curious with Coppersafe, it's 1.25 mL/gal = 2.5 ppm or 0.05 mL/gal = 0.1 ppm).

Copper (says for ich, but it also works for velvet; Hanna Instruments High Range Copper Colorimeter is the hobby gold standard for monitoring treatment levels of copper) and hyposalinity (works for ich and flukes, but not for velvet); if no visible trophonts, run for 30 days; with chelated copper, there's not a need to ramp up slowly (though some people prefer to raise the levels in two doses to make sure they did the calculations right and don't over or under dose it):

Regarding hyposalinity (the fish should be slowly brought up to regular salinity/S.G. Levels after treatment - the link about it below goes into great detail on using this treatment method):

hyposalinity (though this may or may not be linked to buoyancy issues in frogfish; burping the frogfish may or may not help)

Jay commented on another thread that he's never used hypo on a frogfish before; the frogfish that underwent hypo ended up floating at the surface, but we don't know why (it could have been the hypo, overfeeding, a combination of the two, etc.) - I'd probably give hypo an experimental shot, then try burping the fish if it starts floating; to burp it, you basically gently massage its belly while rotating it 360 degrees in the water (so head up with tail down, then tail up with head down, repeat several times).

Hyposalinity

Hyposalinity Jay Hemdal 2024 This term refers to a long-term bath treatment for marine fishes in which the salt content of the water is lowered and held below the point that certain parasites can survive. The salt level reached, and the time of the treatment are the two variables...

www.reef2reef.com

 

[Jay Hemdal Verified Community Expert]

are you able to use copper power to treat ick if they come down with it or is there a better way, Thanks

All three of those species have a relatively high failure rate for quarantine of any type. What happens is that people get them, they die in a few weeks and they blame the quarantine method (or no method if none was used). The actual issue is the high incidental mortality rate in the fish themselves.....

You need to select these fish very carefully - buy them from a good LFS where you know they are eating and have begun acclimating to captivity.

I'm not a fan of using chloroquine on scorpionfish - I had some bad reactions in that group of fish. I don't recall ever using it on frogfish.

In the end, I would use a well established quarantine tank for these, use copper power at 2 ppm and follow it up with prazi.