It CAN Happen to you
 

Over the last couple days, I have had three peices of acro fade in color. I was having some slight alk issues, assumed that was the reason. Upon closer inspection last night I noticed small white bite marks. And the corals affected are all smooth skinned acros. You know what that means....

AEFW

Must have picked them up from an aquacultured peice from the LFS. But just incase, if you have sold me frags in the last little while, please check your colonies, just in case, but it was probably from the LFS. Luckily i have not passed on any frags to anyone is quite a while.

I have to confess, i have never done any dipping, QTing or taken any preventative measures. So it's my own damn fault. Guess I learnt my lesson.

As I am out of town for the weekend I am going to tackle treatment on monday. If anyone has had success in ridding themselves of these beasts, please give me some insight.

Please everyone, don't be like me, QT your new additions or at very least dip. I was just to the point where I was really happy with my tank and the success I have been having with sps, and then i get this kick in the nuts.

This is usually how I feel about the hobby :(
Good luck!

Speaking for all the newbies that might be reading this, what is AEFW?

AEFW = the enbodiment of all that is evil in reefkeeping, Acropora Eating Flat Worms

Ekk
 

That really sucks Mark, good luck with them as you said they are hell. Any ideas on how you are going to combat them, chemically or naturally?
Levi

I have found them two of the past three times I have bought and dipped corals from LFS.

Seems to be a lot of these going around lately. I'm on the look out thats for sure.

best thing to do is just toss those infected colonies, usually they are very localized.

I've got some reading to do to come up with a treatment plan. I am hoping i can avoid the "move all my acros route and separate qt them for more than a month". As it stands they seem to only be located in a very small area of the tank. And initially i am going to work on the hope/assumption that they have no spread to far. I am going to grab some betadine on the way home from the airport sunday night and start dipping all colonies and frags immediately to drop down the numbers.

Has anyone found any predators for these yet? Green madarin? some kinda wrasse?

This is what I did with the last one. Hard to toss away $60 but didnt want to risk my tank full of acros and I have no QT.

Apparently 6 line wrasse will eat them...sometimes.

There was a guy on the ZEO forum who added 6 six lines and they put a dent in the numbers but never got rid of all of them and he still had to QT I think. From all the reading I have done on RC, they spread and you might need to take all acros out :(

Any pictures of the damage? Have you seen any flatworms yourself? Just wondering what they look like, because I had a couple frags do well for about 2 months then all of a sudden bam, splotchy and patchy damage (and fairly severe although the impacted corals are not yet total losses - although they may be in time, I don't know). But I don't see flatworms. And I did dip new arrivals so not really sure what to make of things at the moment.

I don`t have pictures and the ones I found were too small to really see without a magnifying glass. I could see one of them without but most were tiny. They come off right away when you dip in Revive.

They are kind of a clear flat worm that takes on the color of the coral which makes them hard to see. I guess they have a slight tint to them but I dont know how to describe it.

i'd like to add a six line to also keep spaghetti worms in check too but i have a magenta dottyback in there that keeps killing them. Gotta catch him out first. Off the get go i am going to try a dipping approach and try to get the dottyback out and into one of my other tanks so i can get a sixline. Basically make it as hard as possible for these damn things to live in the tank. If i see more spreading then i will have to go the QT route.

I would like to avoid tossing the affected peices, a tri color nana(super sweet), a dark purple valida that grows like a beast, and a nice deepwater white and purple. They are all some of my favorites, i'd like to save them if at all possible.

I have not seen the worms themselves, from what i understand it is next to impossible to see them unless they are off the coral in a white bowl. But the white spots i am seeing on the coral definately matches pictures i have seen of other people's issues.

What dips can people reccomend that will be both effective but not stress the acros too much.

Ok so you can't see them at all on the coral without redipping?

Hmmmmm. Ok, I'll redip and see what comes off. Unfortunately this mini colony has a really pretty acro crab so I guess I'll have to chase him out first before dipping.

Thanks.

And Mark, I know it sucks and I'm sorry, but could you still post a picture of your coral with the damage? It would be good to have a photographic record for reference..

Good luck..

Revive is the best IMO, never stresses the corals at all.

FWIW when the guy was using six lines to help with AEFW, he had to blow them off the corals with a turkey baster so they would float around the tank and the six lines would eat them. Otherwise he said they wouldn`t go near them on the actual corals.

In my experience you can only see them after dipping.

Yeah get that acro crab off! That`s kind of the pain of dipping...getting them out. I use a thin screw driver to chase them out.

hmmm interesting, maybe i will hold off on the six line then. I dont like the idea of blasting them off the corals at this point as it seems pretty localized. Blasting them off would prob worsen the problem from this point.

Can you take a couple of pictures of the affected corals by any chance? I don't know what kind of bites to be looking for? I always dips all my corals, but it is always good to know what to look for.

Do they look like fish bites? Are they in the same area, and are being eaten in that area, or is it all over the place?

http://www.weatherson.com/photos/672_aefl_stretched.jpg

that should have a good picture
signs of infestation:
browning of the coral, little polyp extension, slow tissue death at the base, yellow egg mashes near the base, square bite marks around or near the base.

i will post a ton pics on sunday night of the damage, people need to know exactly what this looks like so they can catch it early. Bites are very small, less that a mm long, slightly oval in shape, appearing in clusters around base areas and armpits of branches.

Acro crabs - I use a plastic chop stick to chase them out of acros, also works well for stabbing and skooshing the bad crabs.

Have you hugged your quarantine tank today?
 

I caught one of these buggers on a frag from the LFS. Luckily it was in quarantine so I only had to treat one coral instead of my whole tank. I used Tropic Marin Pro Dip, and I could watch it (the one I could see) eventually disolve in the bottom of the dish.

they say that a lot of wrasse work, a lot of halichores wrasses are supposed to eat them. Although I dont really believe this information, there are a few isolated cases were they may have but usually they are referring to other flatworms and not acro eating flatworms. A good example is the blue velvet headshield, it only eats flatworms but wont touch acro eating flatworms.

Would this be a contributing factor to STN? I do dip all corals in Revive, but maybe hubby takes them out too soon. I always see critters in the solution, but they always look like little pods and such...

Ontop of dipping new corals, I would recommend breaking the base off. I usually drill into the base and under the coral and just kind of pop it off. The reason is that the eggs are almost always at the base and are not killed by dipping. You can usually see the eggs but I have seen a some clutches that are TINY.

That is actually an awesome idea. I hate the bases on aqua cultured corals and they almost never fit where you want them to go. How long do you dip for afterwards?

I have reef epoxy and an entire evening of drilling and re dipping in my near future:sad:

Me too :) I hate the aquaculture bases!

I dip for a good 5-8 minutes in Revive. I wouldn`t dip as long in other dips though unless directed. I just know revive is very easy on the corals even though it smells like pine sol! I usually see polyp extension hours after dipping and no fading.

The nice thing about chopping off the base too is that you can superglue gel the coral to a piece of smaller rubble and then epoxy that to your LR. So much more natural looking.

What I actually do though is glue it to rubble and then glue an acrylic rod underneath. My LR has holes drilled all through out and I then just place the rods on the bottom of the corals in the holes. I can move stuff all over if needed. Can`t see the acrylic.

that is a fantastic idea, i hate those ugly aquaculture bases anyways

I used to hate to do it because you loose some of the encrusting but a healthy coral is going to encrust within a week or so anyways.

One tip with the Bali corals with the blue plastic bottle cap looking thing in the bottom is to drill all around that thing to loosen up the concrete and then you can carefully pop the coral right out. You then don`t have to break the base at all.

Or you can just chop it right off! :lol:

Wish I knew this prior to all the aqua scaping... next time around when we some day build the 400g, if I ever have the cash.

Spotted Mandarin
 

I had flat worms cover my tank. I added a spotted mandarin (as it is natural food) and it literally wiped them out. The terminator. Possible this is a safe route to try. Beats chemical warfare!!!


Patrick

Mandarins work well most of the time for Red Planaria flatworms...but AEFW are way different...and WAY worse. Any fish added that helps is a blessing but it's a tough war against them.

Just a word of caution when using Revive...I did a mass dip with Revive a couple of weekends ago and thought to dip a bit longer than recommended and to date have lost 8 frags....so be careful and don't dip too long.

Good Luck with your battle...if you only have a few or less than 10 colonies...I'd consider taking them all out and trashing them....unless you have a tank big enough to QT them in...another thing that is suggested is adding Camel shrimp to the sump of the Q tank and rotating corals through the sump....put in sump for .5-1 hour and let shrimp pick off eggs and AEFW...them remove and put back in the QT display...watch shrimps closely..once they eat all the nasties they reportedly move on to eating the polyps.

Thanks for the info, I know after I added my Mandarin any larger brown/ red Flat worms were destroyed. Hope everything works out for you Mark.
Levi

Must depend on the coral...I forgot about 3 colonies in a revive dip for about 20 minutes a while back and all are still alive and well. I dip all my corals for 8 minutes or so and never lost one.

I found this useful link

http://www.melevsreef.com/aefw.html

We pulled all of our acros out last night and like GSP said there were egg strands at the bases. It was the bases that had indentations rather then being flat and molded with the corals. We did long dips in Revive, and put them in my 90g in the basement. I had no clue what was going on with my corals, since we changed the halides, and our well water is changing due to the run off and I thought our RO was not working properly.

So... don't know if it is too late for them or not. I am thinking they might be beyond the Revive now. Will be driving to the city to get the Betadine. The corals look terrible in the 90g and I am almost regretting taking action, but there was really no choice. The bad thing about being new in the hobby is I do get faced with an issue and my experience cannot pin point the issue until much later in the game.

Live and learn... at least the fish are fine.

Well i got to dipping the affected corals and the peices adjacent to them. Only the ones showing bites had the worms on them as near as i could tell.

I tossed my valida as the whole base was egg city, fragged a few tips off of it to see if i can save. Dip used was kent, couldnt find any betadine today so i grabbed this to try out. Stunned the worms, did not kill them, at the reccomended dosage.

took some pictures, will post them up in the AM. I was shocked at the size of some of these monsters, alot bigger than expected.

Before introducing new corals to my system I use Tropic Marin and/or Sea Chem iodine dips, they work pretty well.

As an alternative you can always try this camel shrimp cleaning tank idea.
http://www.korallen-zucht.de/index.p..._id=52&clang=1

As promised, here are some pictures, sorry for the poor quality.

picture of coral base with tons of eggs
http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q...m/IMG_1230.jpg

Another base shot
http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q...m/IMG_1245.jpg

In the bucket after a dip, penny for size reference
http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q...m/IMG_1247.jpg

Look at all this stuff knocked off with the dip
http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q...m/IMG_1248.jpg

When I did our dips, I did have an odd looking snail come off of one of the corals... now that I saw Snappy's post, I have an ID which is not a very good one. I have the 90g tank in the basement and will try the shrimp idea. We did dip everything in Revive prior to putting them into the tank, so I am not entirely sure what went wrong. I will be Qting corals from her eon in... I just think I will stop buying any coral for quite some time until I get this under control.

When we pulled the corals the other evening, we did find eggs hidden in one of the bases that probably were sheltered from the dip to a certain extent, like GSP had mentioned. I am glad I was able to learn from what happened, and if it was not for this post, I would still be struggling with this.

Also i think i pinned down who i got these from. I visited the suspected LFS yesterday and took a gander in thier sps tank, all the remaining acro peices are bit to shreds.