First time using antibiotics

[E.J. Coral]

Last Saturday I was over at my favorite LFS for anemones. They had two H. magnifica. A brown based unit that looked good and a red based mag that, well didn't look so hot. What was interesting about the red was that it wasn't maroon or magenta like the other mags you commonly see with red feet.

It was flaccid, with discoloration on its column, and it was barely sticky. However, it was still attached.... and I am an absolute sucker for red magnifica. I got a great price on it, and took it home.

After one day in my tank, it was flat as a pancake and was regularly inflating and deflating. At the time I felt it had no chance to survive!

I decided to try and treat it with antibiotics. I place the anemone in a specimen container and floated it in the main tank. The specimen container was heavily aerated, and tetracycline was administered at 50 mg/g for 16 hours and 100 mg/g for an additional 4 hours, with an 100% water change when switching doses..

Unfortunately, I accidentally erased the pictures of when I first got it. Shown below is what it looks like after 5 days. Notably it hasn't deflated a single time and it hasn't moved down from where I placed it 8" below 800w of light It still has short tentacles, and is quite flaccid .... but the treatment seemed to help. It went from no chance at all to a 50/50 shot....

 

[Gig 'em]

wow that's great news!!!! That seems like a good idea to treat a new mag with antibiotics to make sure it doesn't get sick, especially since any immune system is probably shot in the animal after all the stressful moving. That is a tremendously beautiful magnifca you have by the way, I'm very jealous. Please keep us updated to it's health as many of us would like to know if this method is truly successful.

 

[AD87]

Wow really nice what made you tetracycline and not doxycycline(sp). From what I was told our aquariums run too high of ph to use tetra? But thats great I wish I had your luck. What brand of tetracycline?