Neptune Aquatics

Grrrr Flatworms...

HiFidelity

HiFidelity

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so it appears that I have flatworms, I had kept wondering what has had my acro looking worse and worse until finally I spotted them cruising around having the time of their lives :mad:

now to deal with this I plan to dip the affected corals/rocks tonight or tomorrow but all I have is revive & a bunch of iodine, will iodine do the trick? if not is flatworm exit the next best option?
 
so iodine won't do anything to them? I can get the flatworm exit but it probably won't arrive till next week sometime so I figured in the meanwhile if there is something I can do I'll do it...
 
Go to your nearest hardware store and pick up a bottle of Bayer Advanced Complete Insect Killer.
2.5ml per cup concentration(you can go above this value and in turn do a shorter dip) and dip coral for 15 minutes. This stuff kills reef pests dead. Occasionally baste during the dip and you should see them come right off. inspect for eggs which look like tiny clusters of spheres as small and elusive as FW are. These should be scraped off if you come across them. Best part is, a big tall bottle of this costs 10$ or so and you barely need any. Makes dipping coral economical and efficient IME and it has always done the trick.
 
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The problem I find with dipping is that it only destroys the flatworms on the coral itself, what if you miss the one that just so happens is moving to another acro? You're going to have to keep dipping in order to get rid of them. This does work however, just a little more effort.

Also, not all melanurus wrasses eat flat worms.

Flatworm Exit helped me get rid of my red planarian flatworms
 
Lawrence thanks for reminding me of Bayer, I had read about it a while back and I told myself to remember to use it if I needed to and of course I forgot all about it and this stuff I can pick up locally which is exactly what I need in this situation...

neuro, I dipped every acro & rock it was attached to in iodine yesterday (got restless & couldn't wait) which seems to have killed all the flatworms that were crawling around on the corals, along with some bristle worms, stars & pods lol
I'm going to wait till next week (just before next water change) and by then I'll have Bayer which I plan to use since it's been proven to work (opinions on iodine vs flatworms seem to vary) and I'll continue to dip every week after till flatworms are completely gone.

As a last resort if this method doesn't work I'll get some Flatworm Exit & treat the whole tank.

I would buy a wrasse just for having one even if it won't eat worms but I can't since my tank is 45 and I already have 5 fish in there...

Thanks everyone for the feedback, I'll update the thread with results.
 
It's nice to have a dipping routine for every time you buy a new coral. I dip in Bayer for 15 min........fresh saltwater rinse, then into Revive for another 15 min.........fresh saltwater rinse and then into the tank or frag tank. This just helps you keep anything from getting in the tank to begin with. I have dealt with my share of pests, and since I started this dipping routine, I haven't had any problems. I'm sure it's not 100%, but it's a little peace of mind.

Make sure you dip corals you get from other tanks as well. We often don't know we have pests until they are bad enough to notice. Good luck with the clean up. Sounds like you have a good plan.
 
Basting corals you've seen them on helps as well. Maybe you could do a six line? If you baste them off corals and into the water column it can help a wrasse find them and become trained to eat them on their own.
 
I dip ALL incoming corals, I think the the mistake has been not dipping in iodine I feel that iodine is plenty strong to kill most hitch hikers but the last few times I've been using revive which is quite a great product but I don't think it was strong enough to kill flatworms or maybe their eggs! Revive is more gentle on the coral itself but I've never lost a coral to iodine either even at concentrations slightly above 3ml/liter for as long as 20 minutes. You live & you learn I guess, I should have dipped iodine AND revive is the conclusion from this mess, maybe iodine and Bayer...

I would love a 6-line but I've read too often that it will bully timid tank mates and in my tank I have 3 timid fish; purple fire fish, yellow goby & a lawnmower blenny. I could be wrong but again I can only go by other people's observations.
 
I have had my system running pestless except for a redbug scare and I just pulled out all the acro and dipped em all even though I only saw redbugs on 2 pieces. I wanted to be safe. Anyway I have been using exclusively Bayer dipping for 15 minutes for all sps and iodine for lps and it works for me. Not too many pests come in on lps as sps do.
 
If you have red planaria flatworms do yourself a favor, get some flatworm exit, treat the entire tank, twice, and be done with it. Simply pulling out corals and dipping them is absolutely useless for planaria, yeah you'll get the ones on the corals off, and perhaps the ones on the rocks off, but any surface they happen to be on will just allow them to repopulate.

Plus planaria are not coral eaters, they're photosynthetic in nature, and yeah they can completely cover a coral because the coral grows to get light, and well the planeria will also go for those favorable light positions.

However I suspect you might have multiple issues, the planaria only become a real issue in plague proportions, and if they were on your acros enough to do harm you'd know that from the get go (unless your acro is red). You might have an acro eating version, in which case there is no tankwide cure.
 
The ones I saw were creamy white, sort of like this one;

aefw.jpg
 
Got one when I discovered I had planaria. I love this fish but he doesn't seem interested. Ate all of the vermetid snails and spaghetti worms though. Seems that a six-line or melarnus wrasse is a better choice for planaria.
 
I've now poisoned my frag tank three times with Levamisole and as of this morning I still have planarians. Feisty buggers. :-( Though they have never grown to serious numbers I still want to eradicate them so that I can feel good about passing on coral. This last time I used a double dose even though they seemed to be dying with a single strength dose. I will keep vacuuming the few I see and try poison again in two weeks. Suggestions I have seen say to not bother treating more frequently than that.
 
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