Red Bug Treatment Journal

[christyf5]

Originally Posted by Myka

Thanks for your info Christy. There is no way I can catch the brittle starfish. Even when I tore my tank apart to move it, I couldn't pry him out of the rock. So he's going to have to tough it out. I'm not entirely sure I will be able to get the Emerald crabs out either. I have read some journals that people have Seahares that do fine with the treatment, so I'm going to leave him in there. The more I think about it, I think I might just treat the tank as is...PITA to set up a tank just for a couple Emeralds that I might not even be able to catch. The little turds don't even eat bubble algae.

I have read other people leaving the treatment longer than 6 hours, so I think I'm going to aim for 10 hours, but I will watch the tank closely for signs of stress. Would be nice to have some pods at the end of this.

I didn't see the massive reduction in pods that others have seen. I'd say I probably lost about 40-50%. There were a few dead ones floating around the tank but the overflow was still crawling with them. It certainly didn't worry me enough to do the treatment again (and again, I gotta be more vigilant and stop being so lazy about prophylactically treating frags, I got hit again just last week, lucky I caught it though).

Oh and I forgot to mention, I think the TMPCC/interceptor combo is prety hard on frags. I picked up a frag last thursday, it was covered, I thought I could get away with a double dose (read it somewhere, didn't work) as it was late and I didn't have time to be farting around with a 1hour interceptor treatment.. Then I figured I would just interceptor the frag in the bag overnight. In the morning it was looking pretty rough, bleached out and thin tissue in some places. I've never had problems treating with either TMPCC or interceptor alone before but I think the combo is not a good idea. The frag is slowly coming around but not a happy camper (and neither am I, next time I'll know to just suck it up and use interceptor).