Some kind of blood sucking worms are invading. Need Help!

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frankie808

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Feb 28, 2013
46
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Pakistan
Hello every one,

I am posting on my friends behalf. He has an 8 footer tank with paroons. Recently we noticed weird worms type creatures, thought it was planaria and the cause could be overfeeding as he didnt have any kind of plants in the tank, only driftwood. The tank was about 4 months old, one cause could be feeders. So what we did was, took out the fish and 80% of the water, and treated the tank with heavy dosage of aquarium salt, cleaned the gravel and everything and filled up the tank again. After a few days these creatures returned, and you can clearly see one or two on each fish. They look like planaria, but are green and are fast crawlers. The ones that have sucked blood look reddish. Could be leeches too, but how can we possibly get rid of them? They are sucking blood but the fish are still active. Some are thin and fast others a bit bulgy and slow. We took out one and it seemed to live without water. We will try to repeat the cleaning process again but what else can we do? check out the pics.

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Clout is the aquarium med of choice for eradicating leeches. You could also try adding salt to your tank since there are several species of leeches that are hypersensitive to salt.
 
if nothing helped and for the worst case remove ur fish from that tank and keep him in another and treate the whole infected tank, filter, gravel and driftwood and everything with potassium permangnate... it will kill all the living things in the tank, including their eggs... and also the beneficial bacteria...

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If you can't find Clout (TRICHLORFON (Dylox)) you could use levamisole however you may need to get it and dosage recomendations from a vet (think it's like 1 gram per 100 gallons) you don't need a lot. Leeches are tough to get rid of but not impossibile. Salt concentrations will need to be higher than the normal 1 tablespoon per 5 gallons, since they are scaless fish paroons will not handel that. If you should decide to use potassium permangnate in your tank be carful not to use any water conditioner with in 48hours of application as it will nutralize it and render it usless. PP is best used as a dip or bath IMO but of course that would not help the tank only the fish PP is very hard on BB and should not ever be mixed with any other med.


Interesting read on the effectivness of levamisole.
http://www.apjtcm.com/zz/2012s1/20.pdf
 
Thank you everyone for the replies. Ill try to get clout or,PP if its available, although i doubt it. If so then for how long should we let it treated? and do we need to remove the fish if we use clout? One more thing, appearently only this tank seems to be infected but to be on the safe side can we treat other tanks with clout that have catifsh (rt and tsn) in it and a few pacu?
 
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