Need opinions about cirolanid treatment

[mhaze]

Hello!

I have a 100+ gallon reef tank in early development. After the initial cycle, I added Floridian aquacultured live rock. This went well and numbers were good, so I am slowly adding fish. I had two tiny ORA gobies and a small Kole tang. They did well for a couple weeks, then one of the gobies got a cirolanid. I caught the fish easily and removed the pest. The fish looked fine that night, but was deceased the next morning - I think the stress, blood loss, and harassment from its ex-partner did this. I confirmed cirolanid under a microscope. A couple weeks went by with no more cirolanids. Today I saw what appeared to be two larger cirolanids on my tang! The remaining goby is clean.

My question is about my plan of treatment. I will catch the goby and move it to a small quarantine tank for a month, to prevent it from meeting the same fate as its ex. I will also catch and remove the parasites from the tang. What should I do with the tang after this? My options are:

(1) remove it to a 15-20 gallon quarantine tank, where the tank would be free of cirolanids, but this might cause stress and feeding would not be optimal. I have plenty of fresh algae to give it and it also takes spirulina-based frozen food, but nothing beats how the comb-tooth grazing seems to benefit it. After a month or two of a clean tank, I could put it back in.

(2) leave it in to try and "attract" remaining cirolanids. This may expose it to more stress, especially if I have to catch it again next week, but its choice of food is much greater. There is a chance of no more cirolanids, but also a chance of feeding and breeding the cirolanids.

(3) do nothing and see if the skunk cleaner shrimp will eat the isopods (I'm not keen on this option).

I am leaning toward a putting the tang in a quarantine tank, but will a small Kole tang be okay in a 20 gallon for a month or two, provided that filtration is excellent? Either way, I will not add any more fish until I have at least one to two months clean of any cirolanid isopods (per research suggesting this as an appropriate time frame to starve them out). There is no other evidence of parasites and water parameters are good. I use a skimmer, bio-filtration, and turf-scrubber but no UV or ozone or anything like that.

Any opinions or survivor experiences would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Morgan

 

[Jdub968]

Well if you can get the inverts out of the tank you could try treating the whole DT with hyposalinity. I'm not sure how isopods react to hypo but I would bet it will kill them

 

[SAT]

This may help:
http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2006-02/bp/index.php

 

[mhaze]

Thank you guys!

This article is great! This should help me immensely. I have not read this yet in my research.

I am usually a fan of changing salinity to treat things, since I have done it in the past very successfully in qt, but I have a lot of happy invert life in the display tank, so I am hesitant to do shift salinity. It's actually a really healthy tank with good numbers. I got some corals for free with an order for IPSF and they have been growing really well. I rescued browned-out branching monti from my lfs and it has put on half a centimeter in growth already. I've got so many happy breeding populations of various "good 'pods" I would hate to risk loss of any of them.

So about the cirolanids - I went home that afternoon and found the tang without any of the parasites. He has not gotten any parasites since and his wounds healed completely.

While I am 100% sure the first critter on the goby was a cirolanid, I was not able to catch the tank with parasites on him to determine if the other two apparent parasites were cirolanids. The tang was too fast I did not get a good view before work - I was unable to see the tell-tale "eyes." Honestly, this ornery little tang has proven extremely healthy, but he also kind of likes to get dirty? At first I was worried about ich, but upon closer observation he just has oolitic sand dust on him sometimes (it falls off fairly quickly). He likes to sand-sift for pods and algae. (First tang I've had that does this!) So he may have gotten something else on him and I may have jumped to conclusions that it was more cirolanids. He also likes to hang out with the cleaner shrimp. Maybe they took care of it? I hate to assume that, but they are very eager to clean things (including my arm when I'm in the tank to adjust things!).

I am keeping a very close eye out and quarantine is waiting! I have a hard moratorium on buying new fish for that tank for at least two months. I hate to remove the tang as it is because he is just getting his confidence and he seems to love the algae in there. I feed him well, but he almost always prefers things he finds on the reef and he frequently has a round little belly. Is the 15-20 gal too small to quarantine him for a month if I need to? He's about three inches long.

(I dropped a screw in this tank last night installing a second AP700 with the canopy mounting kit. Neodymium didn't catch it. I really hope I haven't hurt anything! Seems I always manage to have something to worry about with one of my tanks!)

 

[SAT]

If the isopod is within the right size range, that's exactly what cleaner shrimp do. People try to use cleaner shrimp for protozoan parasites but that doesn't work at all.

Chances are the isopods are not able to reproduce in your tank. That being the case, you're dealing with a limited number of specimens that came in on the rocks. I had a few from some Gulf View rock when I set up my tank. Fortunately they didn't have an opportunity to attack any fish. They tended to get sucked into the plumbing, so if you have a filter sock you can probably get most of them that way.

 

[mhaze]

Thank you Stuart! I feel better about this already. If they can't reproduce, I'm good. I was most worried about them multiplying.

I've never had these on my own fish before but I was able to recognize and remove one or two while inspecting the lr after receiving it. I've also seen them on fish at the ocean.

Good to know the cleaners could have gotten them! I've had peppermint shrimp in years past, but this is my first time with skunk cleaners. Aside from the live rock, I'm trying to stick to indo-pac organisms.