Parasite Identification - Microscope Pictures

snake42490

New member
Hey guys, I had made a thread earlier about possible brook outbreak with my new shipment of fish. Anyway, neighbor is a biologist and thought what the heck I will ask them. We took all the new fish down to the lab this morning for three hours and took various samples from the fish. Mostly gill samples. Anyway, I think we ruled out brook for sure. I think what we found though is
Amyloodinium ocellatum aka VELVET!

This is for sure a parasite, what the books he found showed is that ich is more a clearish form and that velvet is more brownish and doesn't move. The can be round or pear shaped. There were thousands of these parasites on the tissue and we had to dilute the sample multiple times because of the amount.


We also found many copepod parasites on the gill tissues (Anyone, are these deadly or common?) The guy I did this with thought these weren't deadly to the host unlike the other one.
 

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So my friend has been in the lab all day and figured out how to get rid of amyloodium aka Velvet. I found it hard to believe after everything I have read, but she made a high percent solution of hydrogen peroxide and put it in the tank water with the fish. She made a 40 percent solution of hydrogen peroxide and put it in the with fish 25 mg/L for 30 minutes. This was in salt water FYI. Fish handled solution very well and it seemed to allow them to breath better. Upon 30 minutes of the solution we did another sample of fish and all gill samples were 100% clear of Velvet. Take note this also cleared the fish of Ich, which I thought wasn't possible because they were buried deeper. I'm not sure what that was about. Ich, Flukes, and Amyloodium were completely cleared in the trophont stage.

One way to make this solution of hydrogen peroxide is to get a bunch of the stuff at walmart that has the 3% solution and evaporate the water out of it by steaming it down. If you have a 1 liter solution of 3 percent and steam it down you can increase the percent of hydrogen peroxide to 40%.

I was being funny and told her if you could find a cure for this you would make millions and she looked at me and just laughed. She said peroxide will kill this parasite and be safe to the fish. She dropped it on the parasite under the microscope and it just basically ate the thing away.. What was weird is it didn't damage the tissue of the gills!
 
Interesting for sure but, how is it possible? Thanks for posting & please understand I ask from ignorance. I'm not doubting but would be astonished & overjoyed if it could just be this easy. No disrespect intended & maybe I'm just dense & am missing something. But are you sure? I would think 40% would dissolve the fish like an alkastzer tablet lol. Seriously, I accidentally spilled a few ounces in 65g & did a 30% water change immediately. 4
Small fish bolted for the rock, stayed there for days & 2 disappeared forever. So I've just assumed high amounts were instant death for the fish.

Anyone want to jump in? It's not April Fools Day yet is it?
 
hydrogen peroxide is H202 2 hydrogen and 2 oxygen molecules it will split and give of oxygen which is why the fish would respire easily. iT is very interesting that it killed the parasites in the tank .How much of a 40% solution went into the water what is the dosage? Hydrogen peroxide and calcium carbonate are used as a disinfectant. Can you ask her to explain the mechanism in the tank ?. did you use it as a dip? what was the treatment?
thank you
 
hydrogen peroxide is H202 2 hydrogen and 2 oxygen molecules it will split and give of oxygen which is why the fish would respire easily. iT is very interesting that it killed the parasites in the tank .How much of a 40% solution went into the water what is the dosage? Hydrogen peroxide and calcium carbonate are used as a disinfectant. Can you ask her to explain the mechanism in the tank ?. did you use it as a dip? what was the treatment?
thank you

The mechanism is easy. Hydrogen peroxide is an oxidant. It is an even stronger oxidant than bleach. It kills in much the same way.
 
So my friend has been in the lab all day and figured out how to get rid of amyloodium aka Velvet. I found it hard to believe after everything I have read, but she made a high percent solution of hydrogen peroxide and put it in the tank water with the fish. She made a 40 percent solution of hydrogen peroxide and put it in the with fish 25 mg/L for 30 minutes. This was in salt water FYI. Fish handled solution very well and it seemed to allow them to breath better. Upon 30 minutes of the solution we did another sample of fish and all gill samples were 100% clear of Velvet. Take note this also cleared the fish of Ich, which I thought wasn't possible because they were buried deeper. I'm not sure what that was about. Ich, Flukes, and Amyloodium were completely cleared in the trophont stage.

One way to make this solution of hydrogen peroxide is to get a bunch of the stuff at walmart that has the 3% solution and evaporate the water out of it by steaming it down. If you have a 1 liter solution of 3 percent and steam it down you can increase the percent of hydrogen peroxide to 40%.

I was being funny and told her if you could find a cure for this you would make millions and she looked at me and just laughed. She said peroxide will kill this parasite and be safe to the fish. She dropped it on the parasite under the microscope and it just basically ate the thing away.. What was weird is it didn't damage the tissue of the gills!

Steaming off 3% isnt going to concentrate peroxide. If you buy 3% and heat it up to steam it off, what peroxide doesn't decompose will go up in the steam. That works with salts, but not for things that form gasses so easily.
 
I read a huge article online about treating ich with hydrogen peroxide, but it mostly killed the fish too. I can't remember too much but you can probably google it.

I know what I read was from scientists working for fish farmers and they did 3 different dosages, using saltwater mullet as test monkeys. I think they tried 75%, 50%, and 25% peroxide. The 75% killed all the fish after a half hour. The 50% killed most of the fish and most of the ich. And the 25% had good results but did not get all the ich.
 
The stuff we used in her lab was a 35 percent solution, but she did something and made it a 40 percent solution.. I thought all she did was extract some water out of it through steaming.. I will ask her. Anyway we dosed it to the fish as a dip for 30 minutes in SALTWATER. The fish didn't like it much at first, but settled down after about 5 minutes. Breathing rates calmed down a lot. They are still alive today and are eating and color has come back. They were literally on their death beds with velvet. Not eating, laying on the side. Anyway, I will get more information for her and I will keep you posted about my fish. She was telling me the same thing that h202 is a very strong disinfectant and the higher solution 35 to 40 percent ones kill stuff very fast. I will get exact info for you guys!
 
Another thing to note, the samples we took were just infested with Velvet to the point we had to keep diluting the sample just so we could get individual parasites to show up instead of being clumped together. There were a few crypt parasites as well, but VERY FEW. Every bit of information I have read says that ich is buried too deep to ever be affected by freshwater dips etc. NOW--- I'm not sure if maybe there were just a few ich parasites on the slim coat and that the h202 simply removed them leaving some other parasites deeper inside. All I can tell you is after the h202 30 minute dip. we took roughly another 30 samples of all the fish and couldn't find 1 parasite.

I know I am by no means expert at this stuff, but we definitely found out some interesting stuff in the lab :) I actually just got an ich infested fish from pet co just to try the solution with again. I will try and take more pictures.


ALSO-- if any of you guys have access to microscope.. you really should start physically checking your fish for parasites.. It is so easy, I know they are very expensive, but if you would have access to a school or lab or know someone in school you could have them look. Ich and Velvet can be seen at 40 X They are exact same size and shape, except ich tended to move around on the host and was clear in color. They are overall round and pear shaped. Velvet on the other hand didn't move on the samples. It was clearly alive, but didn't move. It also looks almost black / dark brown. It could easily be confused by shape, but definitely not by color.



***And to mention- this part bothered me a lot***

I had a pair of clowns that I have QT for 8 weeks now, they are healthy as can be. They also had some velvet on them. Scary because I was going to put them into my tank! Little did I know, they probably had partial immunity to the parasite.
 
Just got off the phone- We used a 35% H202 (Hydrogen Peroxide Solution)- This does KILL the parasite, but she said it left parts of the dead parasite on the tissue. She said it might be good to somehow try and let the fish swim in some different water for a while to let the parasite parts fall off on their own. I'm going in this afternoon with the fish that has ich to see what it does. Also, I found this study online that is basically what we did... When she was in parasitology school they often worked with h202 to kill the parasites. Maybe some fish people missed the memo about trying it on fish lol?

Hydrogen peroxide is also FDA-approved for use in food fish as Perox-Aid, a 35% hydrogen peroxide solu- tion. Montgomery-Brock et al. (2000) described the use of 35% hydrogen peroxide to treat mullet (Mugil cephalus) fry infested with Amyloodinium. Fish in a flow-through seawater system were treated once with 25 mg/L hydro- gen peroxide for 30 minutes. Mortalities decreased from 200 to 1,000 fish per day to fewer than 10 per day within 3 days of treatment. The authors present data only for
the first 4 days following treatment. Repeated treat- ments would be necessary under most culture conditions. Removing tomonts following treatment might be an important strategy when using this method (Noga, 2010).
 
Great thread thanks so much. In my mind I had visions of H2O2 in that concentration destroying all kinds of cell walls in the gills.
 
http://www.marinedepot.com/Polyp_La...e_Medications-Polyp_Lab-PP2111-FIMEPS-vi.html SEE MY REVIEW
I just remembered I used poly lab medic 3 years ago to quell a ick outbreak during an August heat wave. Poly lab medic is peroxide salts I see they have now added metronidazole to it I don't recall that being in my bottle at that time. The first treatment which I believe is 10 days, decreased disease without any deaths. But ick was still on the fish .The second treatment I double dosed and the ICK subsided completely. The fish were disease free for the following 2 years, until i SOMEHOW INTRODUCED BROOKLYNELLA AND EVENTUALLY GOT WIPED OUT.I think the brook came in when I accidently spilled LFS water from a coral purchase. I went back to the LFS and realized that the damsels that where in the frag system where covered with parasites. LFS owners sometimes think that fish will cure in inertebrate systems. so if you buy inverts from systems with fish in them be sure to qt themafter dipping the corals.Or get burned like I did.
 
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