Need Help I.D.ing what parasites these could be

[navipro1]

I have a pair of these clown fish. http://www.marinecenter.com/fish/clownfish/latezonatusclownfishpairaustralia/
Of course I paid a lot less than those prices but while they were in quarantine for the last few months, they seem to have ich and then it goes away and comes back quickly after so I left them in the quarantine tank with live rocks. Recently however, I think they have something other than Ich as well, it looks like possibly Parasitic Copepods or maybe Argulus (Fish Lice), or whatever they could be because I don't know how either of the above even looks like but is what I assume it is from the fluke medication box list. They are too small to take with a regular digital camera. The parasites are white, about the size of a grain of salt, shape kinda oval like a piece of rice but just very very tiny, there's like 200 of them on the bottom of the black large bowl after dipping my clown fish in medicated ich solution for a few hours. I see them moving around very slowly, their size looks like mini copepods about 1/4 the size of regular copepods in my display tank. I don't see any legs or at leat not with my naked eye. Anyone know what they are and possible how to treat my fish? I have already lost 1 clown to it in less than 5 days since noticing them. They cause the clowns to slime up all over their body and head with a white film and seems like many tiny grains on them moving around, I thought it was ich but I don't think you can see ich move around at the bottom of the bowl. Never had anything close to this before, Any ideas and how to treat them, Please post, I greatly appreciated. Thanks :mixed:

 

[JHemdal]

I've run into copepods from time to time, that are not actual obligate parasites, but more like "fish predators". They can come and go at will, while obligate copepod parasites are usually anchored to the fish. Try searching for Ergasilus as the genus (though I can't tell you for certain if that's what you have). They will show up in FW dips.

I recently ran into a case of parasitic flatworms - getting hundreds off of one fish after a FW dip. They are rice shaped, about 0.75 mm long. Under magnification, you can see they each have two tiny black eyes - could this be what you are seeing?

I'm unsure if the white film you're seeing is a result of the copepods - what if you also have a case of Brookynella going on at the same time? I mean, talk about more bad news - but its something you ought to think about.

As far as treatments - I've not found anything that is a sure thing. One relatively safe idea might be to give the fish a FW dip and then move it to a clean aquarium. Many copepod treatments use organophosphate insecticides (like trichlorfon), and these can be really toxic to people and fish, so I would hestitate to suggest using them.

Jay

 

[navipro1]

Yah, I initially did a ro/di fw dip for 10 minutes which the clown easily survived it without showing any signs of stress for the ich treatment, I then moved it to a 3 gallon black bucket with new 24 hours mixed salt water at .015 salinity (was going to eventually bring it down to .011 salinity) and had the clown in it overnight to see if it gets better with some herbal ich medication is how I end up finding out the hundreds (maybe 400-600) of tiny rice shaped critters crawling on the bottom of the bowl about .25 to .5 mm long. They move as fast as 1cm per 15 secconds. It maybe possible these could be those flat worms your talking about, I initially thought they could be very tiny copepods because I always thought flat worms are flat shaped but these are rice shaped. I couldn't see any legs nor antennas, even with 20/20 vision and a magnify glass, I do notice there are litterally 400-600 that came off the fish crawling around in the black bowl just by leaving the fish in it overnight. WOW, hopefully I can get to the bottom of this, stuff like this makes me want to leave this hobby!