I'm celebrating for now - because I appear to have won my most recent battle with flagellates! These things are difficult to eradicate completely and the often come back. General wisdom here is sound - that we try to control the things that infect our fish, not necessarily completely eradicate them. We want to support the immune system to allow the fish itself to manage the nasties rather than supplant it with meds. Well - I wanted to eradicate these damn things.
So I picked up some beautiful Penang Eruptions from Prahbu a while back. They were eating like pigs for the first three weeks I had them and then one of them slowed down on the feed and turned up with white feces about 3 days later. Both fish where in a quarantine 29 gallons in a different room from my main tank. I tried really hard to keep the two tanks free from cross contamination - not sure what these fish had and not sure what my fish had. Well - it's pretty hard to actually keep everything separate - I had an extension hose attached to my main tank hose for outgoing water changes - I used the extension whenever I did water changes on the QT tank - kept it with the QT tank and tried to make sure no water dripped from one to the other. Not a good plan. Obviously there was cross contamination. So either my main tank gave the new fish something or the new fish gave my main tank something - there is no way to tell and it doesn't matter because sooner or later they would have been mixed and I would be in exactly the same place. I suspect, however, just a gut feeling - that the main tank gave the new fish something.
No symptoms in the main tank yet so I started a metronidazole treatment on the QT tank. Temp to 90, and 400mg/per 10 gallons. Sustained the treatment for 7 days. After five the one fish not eating so well - started eating better. OK - that looked good - went the full 7 days. I was getting ready to go on a 10 day motorcycle ride with the guys I usually ride with and 17 year old son was taking over the water changes. We agreed to light feedings and WC about every 3 days. This is a lot to ask of a 17 year old boy. Lost a fish in the main tank while I was gone due to an internal bacterial infection - probably because the flagellates had a pretty good hold on the main tank - I suspect they were the main cause of the bacterial infection. My son didn't recognize the symptoms quick enough - and we lost one soon after my wife got home. I start a 5 day Furan2 treatment on both tanks.
Out comes the scope - let's see what we're dealing with here. Shot this video from the feces of the largest fish in the main tank. None of the fish in the main tank had white feces and they were all eating normally:
Main tank Red Turq feces:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLohG...yer_detailpage
and a shot from the QT tank - feces from the fish who exhibited no symptoms what-so-ever and was eating very well - piggishly actually! The fish that did present symptoms was presenting normally now - dark feces, eating well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4emANAkwmis&feature=player_detailpage
Pretty clearly these are diplomonads - flagellates - but I don't know which one. Given the numbers in a very small sample from one fish - I'm concerned. I suspect spironucleous - hexamita, but I'm not sure. I send the video to a Biology professor at the College where I work - a colleague who is an expert on protozoans and he confirms that it is a diplomonad but can't confirm the species at that magnification. So I order a 60x objective and a 16x eyepiece for the scope (will get me to 960x). While I wait for that to come in - I start a 10 day metro treatment on both tanks - the 55 and the 29. I also order more metro from KensFish and it arrives in a blindingly fast 2 days from the minute I clicked the submit button (Ken is truly amazing). I dose at 500mg/per 10 gallons of water on each tank since 400 mg per 10 gallons was clearly not enough for 7 days to get rid of these things in the QT tank. As I'm still finishing up the Furan2 treatment I go ahead and does every eight hours for the first 24 and the once a day for 10 days.
At 5 days I scope again from the main tank and see only a few slow moving flagellates after searching the field. Yesterday, 5 days after the metro treatment stopped, I scoped from both the main tank and the QT tank and found nothing after searching the field of 6 separate slides - not one wiggly squiggly thing!
I did see a very interesting something that I think I got off the side of the tank glass because I rubbed it with the Q-tip when I was trying to catch the feces. I will pass this by my biologist colleague but I don't think it's the same as the ones I saw at 500x. This is at 960x and very cool - it looks like some sort of algae... This one didn't move around. It has a long tail that appeared to be attached. It would fill up up its cell body with water by flagellating the cilia at the top of the screen and then a small bulge would form at the top of the cell - that would burst - or - open - and send the organism backward expelling the water - then it would start this all over again. Sorry I didn't get video of the burst - but my camera ran out of storage space just before it opened. I'm currently trying to identify it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI0NIIx27H4&feature=player_detailpage
Anyway - it looks as though I have eradicated whatever intestinal flagellate they had - for now. So for now - I will claim victory!
Adam
