Brown Jelly Syndrome

[Keoki18]

Hey list. I was wondering if anyone has experience will BJS or BJD. I had a large section of my reef become brown mush within 48 hours. Infection started at a physical wound on a large Acro colony (sting from a coral falling on it). from there, it over took the entire colony (1.5' diameter) along with a few locally contacted species (Montipora capitata, Turbinaria sp, and Pavona decusata).

I syphoned as much of the infected tissue as possible from the system, and removed the entire acro colony along with fragging back partially infected colonies to healthy tissue. I then added a power head to this side to ensure good water flow over fragged colonies to debride the cuts and prevent colonization.

Looking at the infected tissue under a microscope, I noticed a booming population of ciliates (I believe it is commonly thought that these are the cause of this disease).

Am I forgetting to do something? Can this disease be related to insufficient water movement? Suffice to say I have had a very rough weekend... well maybe not as rough as Cam Newton, but pretty close.

Thoughts?

 

[stephenhall1987]

I do believe that the ciliates cause the BJD. Like you, I pulled a sample and looked under microscope and saw them crawling everywhere.

Friend's dense SPS tank developed it, and to save some of his stuff, he pulled healthy corals, dipped them, and placed in my dense SPS tank. Within a week my tank broke out with BJD. It just moved across my tank like a wave. I threw a UV filter on, and trimmed all corals way back into the healthy tissue. Dipped a lot of stuff, several times. Lots of water changes, siphoning out the jelly, and then clipping off affected tissue. My other tank got it shortly after this one, though I did not move any corals into it. It must have carried over on equipment or something. Luckily I did not lose much in that tank.

I did finally eradicate it, though I lost a lot of my smaller corals. A lot of larger colonies I was able to save, though they were pruned way back. I don't know if better flow would wash them off of the coral, or just help them spread through the tank.

 

[Keoki18]

Thank you for sharing your experience. I agree that it is very possible that the transmission of the ciliates could have been from equipment sharing. I took a sample from a colony that had been out of water for several hours (full day actually), and upon re moisturizing the tissue I still noticed surviving ciliates. Really amazing, and really frustrating. I have also read a few papers insisting that this is a bacterial out break, and these specific ciliates (which funny enough only appear on infected sites and not healthy tissue) seem to only exacerbate the spread of the disease. It looks like ampicillin has totally stopped the spread of WBD in some experiments. Maybe ill hit a few of my colonies with this.

 

[Keoki18]

And I may be comparing apples to oranges when it comes to BJS vs WBD, but the cases seem similar enough.