What does AEFW damage look like?

[asylumdown]

I've got one acro that's never done well, but I'm pretty sure it's an oregon tort, and they're known to grow really slowly, but I started noticing what looks like a mottling to the colour of it's tissue a few weeks ago, and I just noticed what looks like a patch of the encrusted base of a nearby coral that's missing polyps. I'm not sure if it was always like that and I just noticed, but I'm paranoid.

What does the damage from AEFW look like? If I break off the tort, should I be able to see them with my naked eye if I look at it close up?

[Proteus]

I'm not sure exactly what the look like but on a few frags I dipped there was brownish flat worms that were about 1/2 mm. Hard to see but I did manage to see

[Chowder]

http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2007-09/mc/

[Chowder]

http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=899108&pp=25&page=1

[asylumdown]

Thanks for that link. And it's confirmed. I have AEFW :( I broke the coral that wasn't doing well off the rock and put it in a small dish with about 35X the recommended dose of flatworm exit. 6 of them immediately curled up and fell off. Looking closely, there's hundreds of eggs along where the coral met the rock.

*sigh*. Expletive expletive expletive.

OK, so now it's time for a treatment plan. Do these guys eat all kinds of SPS, or are they specific to Acropora? I think I can get all my acroporids out for treatment pretty easily, but getting the encrusted montiporas will involve a lot more effort.

[Aquattro]

Just acropora, so if you can remove them, you should be ok. Talk to Wayne (Rice Reef) about the process, he's just gone through it.

[asylumdown]

Ok, I'll pm him. I've now dipped the 4 closest Acro colonies to the one that was infested and nothing happened, no flatworms came off anything except the first piece that made me thing I might have it. Is there a possibility that it was just this one coral?

[aqua80]

Is there a possibility that it was just this one coral?

no...

there are 2 options for you :

- live with them
- eradicate them (ie removing all acros and dipping for 6-8 weeks)

[ckmullin]

I've sucessfully treated FW tanks with Fenbendazole to kill flatworms. I'd be curious if It's used for SW tanks as well.

[Rice Reef]

Ok, I'll pm him. I've now dipped the 4 closest Acro colonies to the one that was infested and nothing happened, no flatworms came off anything except the first piece that made me thing I might have it. Is there a possibility that it was just this one coral?

Received your pm. Feel free to call me tonight and I can share with you of my experience. Dipping the neighbouring colonies may not solve your problem and it is encouraged to remove all your acros and keep them in another tank. You will need to starve the AEFW in your main tank while dipping and monitoring all your acros in the other tank. Starving out the AEFW will take at least 8 weeks and for assurance do so for 12 weeks. This is probably the better method somit does not stress your fish and other corals and critters. As for the existing acros cut them off any existing plugs and bases and discard them ( plugs and bases). For any encrusted parts cover the areas with kalk paste. Continue to monitor them for dulling of the colours and loss of PE. And if need to dip again. Flatworm exit does not work for AEFW and nothing is really proven on the market that will destroy the eggs ( or prevent them from hatching) however RPS all out is said to be able to take care of this. There is a thread on RC and the individual there is sharing of his experience with the product.

AEFW is serious and can cost dearly... I have just recently threw out 10 plus pounds of corals and will have to start from scratch again. Good luck and hope you will not get discouraged.

[Myka]

Sorry to hear about your AEFW infection. That's the worst. :(

You can usually battle them by only dipping the Acros. You will find that AEFW have "favourite" coral and if you monitor those ones you should be able to tell if you're winning or losing.

[asylumdown]

I'm going to invest in a few more bottles of flatworm exit to make super concentrated dips. How many times a week do I need to dip my corals to make sure that any eggs that I miss hatch, but are killed before they get old enough to lay their own eggs?

[aqua80]

I'm going to invest in a few more bottles of flatworm exit to make super concentrated dips. How many times a week do I need to dip my corals to make sure that any eggs that I miss hatch, but are killed before they get old enough to lay their own eggs?

flatworm exit don't work with aefw...
Rps all-out works well with the adults (as revive and coralrx) and maybe eggs, but that's not proven for now and if you dip many colonies you have to put them in QT tank...
Do as Rice Reef said to eradicate them... dipping 1x a week for 8 weeks is what I would do... keeping all acros out of the main tank...

Or have a couple of wrasse and blast your corals every once in while to live with them (what I am doing)

[asylumdown]

Flatworm exit certainly worked on my AEFW, but I was using a concentration of over 30 times the recommended dose. At that dose it also killed all the pods, bristle worms, and acropora crabs on my corals as well. In fact, the acropora crab's legs started falling off before they died, so I'm wondering if it somehow affects their connective tissue? The worms that were on the visibly damaged piece started curling up and dying the instant they went in the water with the flatworm exit. They fell off after about a minute, but again, we're talking concentrations several orders of magnitude higher than the bottle recommends. I would never put that high a dose in my display, as it would likely wipe it out.

I'm following the thread on Reef Central about RPS all out. I'm going to buy some, and hopefully the guy who's posting close up pictures of the eggs will report that they've all been killed by this treatment. QTing all 43 colonies of my acroporids for 8 weeks in a way that guarantees none of them die to to system instability or poor water quality will require nothing short of a second, fully established reef system with all the lights, flow and dosing equipment I have on my big tank. That's not a cost I'm capable of outlaying ATM, and after my experience with losing every single fish because of a QT system failure, I have little interest in courses of treatment that end up being worse than the disease. Whatever chemicals I use, the protocol will have to be dipping, then returning to the display.

[kien]

Or have a couple of wrasse and blast your corals every once in while to live with them (what I am doing)

With all the AEFW talk recently I did my fair share of googling and did find quite a few nice sps reefs that employ this methodology. They simply accept the fact that the worms are there and keep their population down so that they do not reach plague proportions and over run the colony. This appears to have worked for quite a few people. I myself would probably lean towards this. Once you have them you will probably have them FOREVER unless you throw away your entire stock or treat your entire stock all at once for weeks.

[asylumdown]

This quote from a thread on WAMAS' forum (http://wamas.org/forums/topic/33942-lanmans-acropora-eating-flatworm-aefw-thread/) is exactly why I don't want to QT all my acroporids:

"Through all of this - I lost no corals to AEFW. I lost corals to being moved around from tank to tank, and from over-long dipping, too-harsh dips, etc. But the AEFW damage corals pretty slowly. They are pretty fragile creatures, and rarely survive more than 24 hours in a cup of water at room temperature. They have a tendency to just 'dissolve' (autolyse) when they get stressed."

My knee jerk reaction to ich in my tank led to me killing every fish I had when the QT tank they were in over-heated. I'm sure some/most of those fish would still be alive if I had left them in the display and learned to manage ich. I wanted to 'eradicate' ich from my system - and I did, by eradicating all my fish. I'm going to try my best to manage this in a way that doesn't put the lives of my otherwise extremely healthy corals at risk. From what I can see after extensive searching, next to nothing is known about the life-cycle of this parasite, and the guy who wrote that long post found that even after leaving some acroporids in his tank while he experimented on the infected ones, his system was cleared of infection by treating the infected corals. That gives me some hope. I also found it interesting that he found crushed garlic pills would kill the flatworms at high concentrations. That might be something to invest in.

[Aquattro]

FWIW, I had AEFW years ago, long before anyone knew what they were. I saw a couple now and then under the scope, and just thought they looked cool and put them back in the tank. The tank thrived for years. I had a 6-line wrasse, not sure if that helped.
But the task of moving a full SPS into QT ,weekly dipping, etc, would probably be way worse than dealing with them in tank. Worst case, one coral gets hit bad, so toss it out. Unless these things were absolutely killing all my corals, I wouldn't do anything other than baste and buy wrasses.

[lastlight]

I believe Sanjay Joshi lives with them. Just looking at his tank is proof that you can do this no prob.

[asylumdown]

FWIW, I had AEFW years ago, long before anyone knew what they were. I saw a couple now and then under the scope, and just thought they looked cool and put them back in the tank. The tank thrived for years. I had a 6-line wrasse, not sure if that helped.
But the task of moving a full SPS into QT ,weekly dipping, etc, would probably be way worse than dealing with them in tank. Worst case, one coral gets hit bad, so toss it out. Unless these things were absolutely killing all my corals, I wouldn't do anything other than baste and buy wrasses.

I believe Sanjay Joshi lives with them. Just looking at his tank is proof that you can do this no prob.

I just looked at my bottle of CoralRX. It expired in November 2011 - perhaps that explains how I got them :redface:

Here's my plan of attack: I just ordered a couple bottles of Revive and RPS All Out from Reef Supplies. When they get here, I'm going to dip all my acropora corals that I can easily get off the rocks in the All Out. If I see no signs of any more worms falling off, I'm going to call it a day and only think about it again if I see new damage to a coral. No crazy interventions, and I don't want to mess with something that doesn't seem that broken.

[lastlight]

yeah i like that approach although it sounds like all acros should be done in this manner to make it worth it right?

[aqua80]

I'm following the thread on Reef Central about RPS all out. I'm going to buy some, and hopefully the guy who's posting close up pictures of the eggs will report that they've all been killed by this treatment..

hehe that guy is me :wink:
for now after 8 days eggs seems intact... we'll see if they hatch...

I lost a couple of frags from the initial attack but after that everything is doing great, even if I do see some bite marks here and there and some adults when blasting....

In fact I believe there's many more AEFW tanks out there that people just don't know they have it... If you don't do QT on every coral you get you will have them someday (or you already have them...)
I dip every coral I put in my tank with coral rx and revive, removing the original plug etc... and still got them...

my tank is not doing so bad with them for the last 8 months (at least) :

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-dmC75Vt8L-o/UTP7rqx6JJI/AAAAAAAABAQ/2dJEQtZkuLg/s720/IMGP4556.jpg

melanurus wrasse, yellow wrasse and sixline are my friends...

but ReefBum is (was) the best looking tank with AEFW for sure :

http://www.reefbum.com/linked/july152009tankpic1a.jpg

[asylumdown]

oooh, you're Canadian?! Sweet, I'm really looking forward to the long term outcome of your test. My suspicion is that it won't kill the eggs of AEFW, the wording on the promotional materials is too vague. They list all the things that it kills, and then says in a blanket statement 'and kill the eggs too!'. It very likely kills the eggs of some of the things that All Out treats, but they very specifically never say 'kills AEFW and their eggs', which in my opinion was a very intentional wording choice.

However, the product does seem incredible effective at killing everything else. I only hope I can save some of my acropora crabs. I love those little guys, I have one in every colony large enough to house one.

[Zoaelite]

I don't have experience with this matter but has anyone tried the nudibranch Chelidonura varians (http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2002/5/short)?

[Reef Pilot]

If you go fallow with acros, do the AEFW's die off in the tank? I know this may not be practical for most, and there are always acro bits that break off, and end up hidden in the rocks at the back of the tank somewhere. But just curious.

[Zoaelite]

Probably not the best suggestion as you have flow that would make hurricane Katrina jealous, but in general have these been used?

[asylumdown]

I actually bought one of those nudibranchs once to control red flatworms (people call them planaria, but they're flatworms). It was cool watching him vacuum up the little flatworms, but in a 275 gallon tank with 9 or 10 million flatworms, there wasn't a whole lot he could do. I finally just dosed flatworm exit, and watched my tank do an impression of the sacking of Rome for an hour. I'm pretty sure the flatworm exit either killed the nudi, or it starved due to lack of food afterwards. I wouldn't be against trying it again, but the problem is supply - they're not the easiest nudibranch's to come by, and I think you'd need them in pretty large numbers to do any good. Also, I'm not sure how the food situation would work - do they even eat AEFW? If so, and you've only got a small population, it seems like the nudi might starve before he gets them all, and if you've also got a co-infestation with a preferred food source that could sustain the nudi, wouldn't it just eat those instead?

[asylumdown]

If you go fallow with acros, do the AEFW's die off in the tank? I know this may not be practical for most, and there are always acro bits that break off, and end up hidden in the rocks at the back of the tank somewhere. But just curious.

They're obligate acro predators, so yes, they'd starve with no food. It looks like their egg's take around 21 days to hatch, and then who knows how long for them to starve to death.

[asylumdown]

I'm starting to see AEFW damage everywhere, but I think it might just be my imagination. I'm getting really paranoid because I just realized that one of my larger, healthier acro colonies that was growing all gangbuster style before I left for mexico is completely, 100% dead. I didn't notice until this morning because it's in a depression of one of my rocks, and a birdsnest colony has grown large enough to make it hard to see.

I don't think that flatworms can take down and entire colony that fast, but I have three different colonies of that same species/colour morph (proof you need to vary the stores you buy coral from) and it's the only that's dead. The only other thing that I can think might have killed it was a temperature spike, my Apex tells me that my tank hit 27.6 degrees the day before I came home from Mexico - it must have been really sunny and warm outside for the house to have gotten so warm inside. Sometimes I regret the choice to put in floor to ceiling windows along the south wall of our house...

[asylumdown]

Well the good news is that after dipping 50% of my acropora in Coral RX (I was getting less and less comfortable waiting for the All Out to arrive), I've not found a single flatworm. The bad news is that I discovered montipora eating nudibranchs in the process.

Fml. This might be the end of me as a reefer. I don't have the time to deal with two problems like this. If that coral that came on my rock truly is montipora, there's nothing I can do about the nudibranchs. Removing all of the coral on the rocks will require removing 50% of my rock.

[Reef Pilot]

Don't remember reading about the conclusion of this. Did you eventually beat the AEFW infestation and how, or are you just living with it?

[asylumdown]

In both cases, nothing came of it. The frag that had the flatworms was the only coral that had them on them. I dipped everything I could get off the rocks a second time maybe a month later and found nothing. I tossed the coral that had them, and that was the end of it.

There were only two Montipora eating nudis, and I strongly suspect they had hitchhiked in on an LPS that I had added to the tank a couple of days before. They were both small, I don't think they were sexually mature yet. I removed those two, and that was the end of it on that front as well. I've got at least a dozen large colonies of montipora and dozens of large acros, so I feel like 8 months later I should have seen something if they were still present in the tank.

I consider myself very lucky.

[Reef Pilot]

That's a great to hear! That AEFW scares the crap out of me...

[asylumdown]

yah they're a pretty awful thing to have happen. I've been religious about dipping things since then and so far so good. The frag (more of a mini colony really) that had the worms only had two flatworms on it, but when I looked at it closely there were hundreds of eggs. The only explanation I have for why I didn't get hit like everyone else is that I got to it before any of the eggs hatched, which was dumb luck more than anything. Very nerve wracking month though.