marine velvet - experimental treatment thread - hydrogen peroxide
 

well - I have marine velvet in my tank
I am pretty faithful about quarantining my fish, but have been slack on the corals - so I think it hitch hiked on a coral I bought a couple weeks ago.


I have been doing some research on using hydrogen peroxide to treat it - it seems relatively simple, easy on the fish and effective. I thought I would write a log as to how it went.

I am using 75mg/L (9.5mls 3% hydrogen peroxide/ 1 gallon tank water) as a 30 minute bath.
- the fish did not seem stressed at all in the dip and the ones that showed lesions seemed to get almost instant relief (no visible velvet after the dip, only a few raw lesions where the fish had been most affected, breathing less laboured)
- the fish were then placed into quarantine.

I plan on repeating the dip in 7 days, then the fish will remain in quarantine until the fallow period is up.


-starting with 11 fish - 2 tangs, 2 clowns, 2 wrasses, 2 bangaiis, 1 hawkfish, 1 assessor,1 gramma

- I lost a tang and a wrasse overnight, but these were the sickest fish and probably would not have survived the night regardless. Everybody else is happy and eating w no visible signs of distress/velvet.

will keep this thread updated.

How are your fish doing today?

hope they are ok :(

i thought about dosing my entire tank with the stuff last week when i noticed my fish started scratching on the rocks. Very stressful watching my fish constantly scratch themselves/ dart randomly.

My guys were eating well and swam actively so i opted to keep the lights off and up the heat so the tank runs at 84 constatnly. I also mix in the following medication (http://www.seachem.com/Products/prod...onidazole.html) with mysis and have only been feeding them the medicated food once a day with nothing else (thereby forcing them to accept the medicated mysis).

so far so good - havent seen the fish scratch ONCE since they i started medicating. They have had three doses so far. The medication can either be added to the water column or added to food. I am going to keep medicating them for another week then get some UV hooked up on very slow flow to see if can kill the parasites in the water column.

so far, all is well. No new lesions, all eating. So far it looks promising.

When I had my discus I was treating them for flukes every weeks for 2 months with permanganate potassium. This is very strong oxydizer and the baths were 4 hours at a certain concentration....very very laborious to do.

H2O2 should give you the same results, however you have to treat the entire quarantine tank or any cyst or eggs left in the tank will eventualy hatch. It would be best to dip them, then change to a fresh QT, then repeat and back into another fresh and parasite free tank, desinfecting each tank each time. Otherwise the fish will just get reinfected going back into the QT with the parasite.