Acriflavin treatment for apparent infertility

[Alight]

I recently discovered what may have been causing apparent low or no fertility in my discus.

First, the best treatment method I have come up with so far.

Once eggs are laid, take cone with eggs out and put in 10 gallon tank. Treat with acriflavin at Jehmco's recommended amount (1 teaspoon per 10 gallons). I used my regular RO water with my own RO right-like treatment, at 30 tds and 45 tds so far. May not matter much. Both had better than a 90% hatch rate. I removed the parents (put them in another tank) and treated the tank the parents were in with the same dose rate of acriflavin. The day before the eggs hatched, I treated the parents with the same dose rate of acriflavin for 1 hour (in a bucket).

I then changed all of the water in the now empty tank, and rinsed the parents in fresh regular RO water, and put the parents back in the tank now filled with clean water. It is really difficult to remove all of the acriflavin, so there may be a bit of tint to the water.

After the eggs hatched, I rinsed the cone with the hatch in a small bucket of fresh RO water, screened the cone, and put them back in with the parents. Now the fry and parents are all back in normal RO water in the tank they were originally in. I make the TDS higher for the hatched babies, (gradually take them from around 45 - 85 over 2 days.

Using this, two pairs that previously I only had 1 good hatch from, I now not only got a great hatch (both pairs had over 300 fry), but one of the pairs which had never taken good care of any hatches, now took great care of the hatch.

Now the background.
I have been breeding discus for many years. First tries went well, but then fertility declined, fungus formed on eggs, and parents ate babies, didn't care for fry, etc. Eventually I turned over the all the fish, and then, a year later started again, and all was well, then the same thing happened. Reduced fertility, egg eating, fungus on eggs etc. I asked some members about possible reasons, and got the usual fixes, including nutrition, water quality, methylene blue, etc, and tried all of these. Best was some hatching in the sterile water, but low hatch rate, and parents ate all the fry when they came out of the screened cone. Subsequent tries failed completely.

I was having the same old problem, and about to start over again when I read the recent post about a random acriflavin treatment, then a bunch of unexpected fry that they hadn't even seen.

So I tried acriflavin on a whim. The first try was bad. I put the acriflavin in the tank with the parents still in the tank after the eggs were laid. I did not remove the acriflavin. The eggs did not fungus at all but the parents ate the eggs just before they were due to hatch. I removed the acriflavin, but it took days to really get rid of it all, and the parents really suffered, banging around the tank, injuring themselves. Also, the biofilter was affected, causing ammonia levels to get moderately high. I did notice that while the acrifavin was in the tank, no fungus formed and food did not rot at all if left in the tank.

I was encouraged by the fact that it looked like most of the fry would have hatched if the parents had not eaten them, so tried again, and came up with the treatment at the top of this page. It worked great. Over 300 fry from two different pairs that had not had any fry in 5 months. And the parents took great care of the fry. The fry have almost no deformities (previous spawns sometime had quite a few, to almost the whole batch).

OK, so I hypothesize that the acriflavin kills off a pathogen that selectively increases with egg laying. It is possibly it is a specific strain of fungus or bacteria that is selected for by the breeding process. It is very difficult to eradicate. Antibiotics do not get rid of it (tried that), and sterilizing my water sources didn't totally work either. The pathogen not only kills the embryos before they hatch, but if they hatch also cause weak fry and deformed fry. However, acriflavin works great. It is possible that this pathogen will mutate and still cause a problem later on, but for now, the problem is solved.

Given the many posts that describe apparent fertility problems similar to this, I believe this may be a common problem. The fixes that did work for these people suggest that it is very likely their problems were caused by the same organism. The treatment I describe here is at least a bit easier than the fixes others have come up with. I'd like to hear from anyone who tries this about if it worked or not.

Al Light

[CliffsDiscus]

I don't treat the parents only the eggs before hatching.

Cliff

[CliffsDiscus]

Al,
Sorry I could not give a full response because of problems posting reason is no permission for posting. I'm making this a short post by saying that
acriflavin do not make a difference for my production,
but breeders are using prolactin with good results.

Cliff

[smsimcik]

So where can we get prolactin?

[Keith Perkins]

If Prolactin doesn't work for you, you might also try Levimasol. Levimasol is an immune modulator, basically gives the fish a boost. It may encourage the fish to "get in the mood".

[Alight]

Keith, I tried levamisol which had no effect at all. Prolactin is a hormone that has many functions, one of which is to produce milk in mammals.

My problem was not actually fertility. It was that the eggs were being killed off before they could hatch by a fungus or bacteria. You could see the embryos developing but they would never hatch because they would fungus before hatching. The more times the fish spawned the faster the fungus formed and killed off the eggs. If I put the eggs in sterile water, about 1/4th would hatch. Probably more would have hatched if I had dipped the eggs in sterile water several times before I put them in the tank of sterile water.

[CliffsDiscus]

So where can we get prolactin?

Prolactin are remove from the pituitary region of a Discus and injected into the breeding Discus causing the production of slime. This process will make the parents less likely to eat their fry.

Cliff