levamisole treatment
levamisole treatment
I had observed flatworms in my tank for several weeks this spring. At first I was mortified, because I had heard so many horror stories from fellow reefers about the dreaded "flatworm infestation". I spent a lot of time researching the critters, and I am pretty sure what I had was convolutriloba retrogemma, although ID can be somewhat difficult, as there are 100's of species of flatworm. What I did find was that most flatworms are non-threatening to marine aquaria, but can become pests if the flatworm population gets out of hand. Although I could see no evidence of damage, I eventually decided that I would like to get rid of them, because they just didn't look that great crawling around the tank, and I wouldn't be able to trade any coral with flatworms in my tank (although apparently someone else didn't care about this because I got them from somewhere!?). I knew about flatworm Exit, but had read mixed reviews. Then I found this thread, and after digesting all the info from the original levamisole test, and questioning Inkmaker a few times, I decided to go for it and purchased 5 grams. I decided on 5 gms/300 gals based on the past reviews on this thread. I mixed it in 1 liter of RO/DI water, which gave me enough for 4 doses if needed for my 72 gal tank (65 gal water). I have a mix of soft and hard coral, snails, cleaner, peppermint and pistol shrimp, lots of minil stars, blue chromis, yellow tang, royal gramma, starry blenny, watchman goby, false percs, pajama cardinals, urchin. I turned off the skimmer during this. I don't have a sump, and don't do any other filtration. I did do a 20 % water change before starting, just because it was time. Also, about 2 weeks prior I had vacuumed out about 50-75 of the critters just to try it, and I vacuumed out maybe 30-40 more before adding the chemical. I didn't have a huge population, but they were visible in the front glass and front sand, and on some of the live rock. I never saw any on coral. I added the chemical about 6:00PM. The royal gramma swam up into the stream as I was pouring it in, then took off like he was electrocuted, I though he was going to die, but he ended up fine. As far as the fish, they were all fine and I saw no ill effects, except for the blue chromis (I have 5), which changed color to a darker mottled blue, and hid behind the live rock and kind of shivered the whole time. Within a minute or two, I could see dead/dying flatworms floating around the water column. What was interesting was that some died instantly, others flailed for awhile and then died, while a few seemed unfazed in the inital couple of hours and were still alive. The hermits never seemed to notice at all, the shrimp likewise. I have 3 or 4 different species of snail, they seemed fine except for the nassarius. After a few minutes they freaked out, coming out of the sand, crawling up the glass and rocks, and then stopped as if frozen, fully extended out the their shells. I really thought they were goners. But to my amazement, after a couple of hours, they cam back to life and moved on. As far as I can tell none died, but they sure didn't like it. The other animal that didn't like it were the mini brittle stars, of which I have dozens. They crawled out of the woodwork so to speak, as if they were in severe distress. Many ended up floating around the tank as if they were dead. I really thought they weren't going to make it. It was several hours later that I saw some of them coming back to life, and a few didn't seem to be affected. I'm pretty sure I lost some of them, but it wasn't as bad I had initially thought. I also have a lot of "regular" mini starfish, not sure what they're called, they didn't seem to be affected. The coral in general seemed fine, although the toadstool and mushrooms closed up for awhile. Frogspawn, GSP and others were fine. I left everything alone and just watched for several hours. I didn't see any ill effects as time went on, so I left everything overnight. The next morning the blue chromis were still acting weird, so I did a 20% water change, then went to work. That night I was going to run my canister filter with carbon, but it leaked so I couldn't use it. I did another 20% water change, then added carbon to a sock and put it in the outlet chamber of my skimmer, and turned that on. So now it's been a couple of weeks, everything lived through this, but it was stressful for me. I know other people did additional doses at 7 and 14 days, but I'm going to wait because it did put a lot of stress on the system, and I don't know what smaller organisms were killed that I don't know about. So far no sign of any flatworms.
