New clowns

[mikev]

Internal parasites in botia loaches come in many flavors and often do cause growth retardation -- if there is a balance between the parasite(s) and the host. And growth stopping at 3cm does indicate that the animal is unhealthy. Typical parasites in botias are nematodes, of many types, some direct but more often indirect, up to 1/3 of all new botias carry them.

Spironucleus is a totally different problem, it is a protozoan infection caused by flagellates, not worms.

[Loachloach]

Yes, I understand that there are many diseases that can affect fish and in turn need different treatment. I mentioned just one of the methods for one type of common disease because it's totally harmful eradicate. People seem to dump meds for no reason expecting miracle results with All-In-One wonder treatments which don't exist. I've tried my share of meds over the years. One needs to be quite certain what they are treating for and what is the possible cause as you can do more damage than good by adding meds that won't help.

So I just didn't feel comfortable when people just lightly suggest the "best med" for the one fish which may or may not be having a disease.

I've had my clown loaches for maybe 3 years, I can't remember. They've all grown well beyond the 3cm mark, the biggest is nearly 6 inch so I must be safe They've never been treated with any meds.

Knifeback appearance, loss of weight but otherwise very lively fish with good appetite is normally caused by spronucleus/hexamita. It's often accompanied with thin white feces. In very final stages only fish will be very thin and hang at the surface.
Other internal parasites may need different approach, no doubt. I have not read stats for other parasitic infections but read a lot about hexamita and it's the most common opportunistic protozoa, or whatever you want to call it, present in almost all tanks and most fish unless treated for it. It may not affect them at all for their life time though so most have the one off death here and there without knowing.

[mikev]

Really sorry to make you uncomfortable, but perhaps you shall be kind enough to think this through a bit

So I just didn't feel comfortable when people just lightly suggest the "best med" for the one fish which may or may not be having a disease.

A yoyo loach that does not grow beyond 3cm may or may not be having a disease? Let's be serious here. Of course, one cannot diagnose a disease but one can make reasonable guesses and they would not include diseases that are very uncommon in botias, like your livebearers' spironucleus or hexamita. Or a few more diseases like mycobacteriosis -- again, uncommon in botia.

The two most probable causes here are internal parasites and genetics. The former you can treat and safely, the latter you cannot. So it is prudent to eliminate the most probable cause here.

I've had my clown loaches for maybe 3 years, I can't remember. They've all grown well beyond the 3cm mark, the biggest is nearly 6 inch so I must be safe They've never been treated with any meds.

It is very nice, you were lucky. Some are, some are not.

In the dark ages... before flubendazole became available/known circa 2005 or 2006 I've been lucky a few times too ... and not so lucky a few more times.

Basically not treating wild caught fish for internal parasites is just not prudent, because this is an invitation to serious problems, like full wipeouts.

Incidentally, comparing clowns (which you are referring to) and yoyo's (which is the problematic 3cm fish) is quite misleading... rates of growth are quite different.

People seem to dump meds for no reason expecting miracle results with All-In-One wonder treatments which don't exist.

Amazingly, while your statement is generally correct, it is false for specifically botias. The two most common health issues are internal parasites and Ich. Flubendazole happens to be effective against wide range of internal parasites, as well as Ich, and as well as (totally irrelevant here) hexamita.

so.... read on it a bit, and do a bit of experimentation ... you may learn something interesting

[Loachloach]

I understand what you are trying to say and thank you for the detailed information. I'll keep the funbendazole in mind if I need to treat internal parasites. I am not trying to cause an argument here and I get your point of view that fish may be infected sometimes and need treatment.

The two most probable causes here are internal parasites and genetics. The former you can treat and safely, the latter you cannot. So it is prudent to eliminate the most probable cause here.

The most probable cause for stunting is improper food, feeding regime and bad water conditions while in the growth stage. This can in turn lead to diseases and alignments down the line.

[mikev]

Yes, you can definitely stunt a fish with improper keeping, especially when overcrowding... but it is likely not the case here.

I actually had a case similar to the "3cm yoyo" years ago, involving a Kubotai. Given that it is a slow growing species it took more than a year to realize that the fish is not growing enough (with young yoyo one would know in perhaps 3-4 months). The kub was dewormed but a less effective med, so I (falsely) assumed this not to be the cause. Eventually the fish developed a bacterial infection (not typical for botias unless they are weakened by something else), I shook it off, but it died soon afterwards anyway. And then a necropsy revealed the problem all right.

[Loachloach]

Yes, you can definitely stunt a fish with improper keeping, especially when overcrowding... but it is likely not the case here.

In my experience the issue for stunting is not exactly overcrowding. Overcrowding plays a role on water quality and stresses the fish so they get susceptible to diseases. But what stunts them really easily is improper food, not enough food when they grow. I've stunted small livebearer fry in a large tank, not nearly half way stocked and no predators to eat them, just a few larger fish that mop up all food. They just couldn't get to the food and were running aimlessly. Some of them grew fine, some got stunted. The other bunch I left in the fry tank with power feedings and lots of water changes, severely overcrowded grew excellent and very fast.

I've grown cory fry too lots of times. They grow really fast if they are fed properly. At 4 weeks 2.5 cm long and you could nearly sell them. The tank can be overcrowded as it likes, just good water quality/water changes, cleaning left over food daily is the key to prevent spikes with such power feeding. Without these amounts of food, the growth rate really slows down significantly, some fry may die malnourished.
Some people's 4 week old fry are still a 1cm long or less. I'd presume that's why they feed discus fish so much too, but it works for all fry. I'd presume for slow growers such as certain loaches, one would need to administer extra food for a lot longer time to get the proper result and be on top of water quality as a consequence. We dump them in community tanks with larger tank mates, some of them from their own species too, which doesn't matter as they are still outcompeted.

On another hand are there any side effects of using flubendazole in tanks? As in crippling the filtration or stressing healthy fish?

[mikev]

Stunting does occur with cory fry too and is caused by overcrowding.... I've seen horror photos of c.paleautus raised by a friend, large group in 5g tank, not only the juveniles were smaller but also malformed. I never had this happen with my cory fry, however, I did have this effect with rainbows when I tried to raise too many. And I had this effect with loach fry too (fortunately, temporary) when raising them with cory fry.

Flubendazole does not appear to have any negative effects. Definitely no stress or biocycle issues. The correct way to use it is preventively when the fish just comes in, not waiting for disease signs... this is better for the fish and saves time/headaches for the owner. Flubendazole is bad for low-level inverts... while shrimp will likely be ok, snails/planaria/hydra will be likely toast.... so don't use it with quality snails around and don't put any quality snails into a flubendazole-treated tank for a couple of months.

Generally I treat all new fish and since I started doing this, 3 month survival rate increased noticeably. Not a complete solution because problems with new fish are not limited to parasites, but a major factor.

Some FAQ's state that flubendazole may be bad for fry/very young fish. I do not have any evidence to support this, only see how in theory this may be correct, and therefore might make an exception by not treating wild caught fry... in fact, I'm after some hesitation not treating one new group right now. The fish appears to be healthy, it seems I'm the only one who has them, it is corys not loaches (thus chances of parasites are much less), so it is a judgement call between two low probability risks.

[Loachloach]

Stunting does occur with cory fry too and is caused by overcrowding. I've seen horror photos of c.paleautus raised by a friend, large group in 5g tank, not only the juveniles were smaller but also malformed.....

Well that's not even called overcrowding. That's called stuffing
I grew about 40 cories in a 15G tank. They are all alive, properly developed and healthy after 3 years now. I have them all. But I split the load as soon as they hit the 2.5cm mark.

[mikev]

Well that's not even called overcrowding. That's called stuffing

Well, yeah, but this is what people do all too often. Space tends to be in short supply, for example, I only have 188 right now, and it is difficult to add more. I believe he had about 70 in 5.5g and the results were not pretty.

But then, just what one is supposed to do with large spawns indeed? Setting up more raising tanks is not always an option. Culling excess fry?---not nice.

[Loachloach]

Amazingly, while your statement is generally correct, it is false for specifically botias. The two most common health issues are internal parasites and Ich. Flubendazole happens to be effective against wide range of internal parasites, as well as Ich, and as well as (totally irrelevant here) hexamita.

Spironucleus is a totally different problem, it is a protozoan infection caused by flagellates, not worms.

Hey, Mikev. I am resurrecting this thread a bit. You might object I know

I found a scientific study which says that amongst other 17 drugs, flubendazole is ineffective against spironucleus/hexamita.

Link: http://www.int-res.com/articles/dao/33/d033p051.pdf

Fish with hexamita won't be cured by flubendazole or levamisole apparently, it may just reduce the infection temporarily. Healthy fish can supress the symptoms developing until stressed again which may give rise to the idea that the med used worked in the first place.

As I know from experience, a full tank outbreak is not very common at all but if it does, it wipes out fish on a mass scale. They literally waste away as long as the blood stream is not affected and just the gut but if the spironucleus goes into the blood stream, fish just drop dead and this can happen before much visual signs are present.
In more regular circumstances, you've got just the one odd fish that eats like a pig but wastes away, assumes a knifeback appearance eventually, and sunken belly, may hang at the surface, may have white stringy poop, starts losing balance a few days before dying, but it may not die for a year to 6 months, which must be very painful for the fish. And the fish just looks smaller and smaller with big head and big fins compared to the body mass.

I actually had a case similar to the "3cm yoyo" years ago, involving a Kubotai. Given that it is a slow growing species it took more than a year to realize that the fish is not growing enough (with young yoyo one would know in perhaps 3-4 months). The kub was dewormed but a less effective med, so I (falsely) assumed this not to be the cause.

Perhaps that one may have had hexamita and the drug you administered was not effective against it or didn't supress it enough so the fish's immune system deals with it. But it can be completely eradicated.

As I mentioned, I've seen my share of hexamita infected fish before I figured out what it is and how to treat it, and I "resurrected" a very wasted platy once that almost had no belly. I've seen that in clown loaches sold for sale which people reckon are impossible to cure, but maybe because they try curing them with de-wormers rather than meds effective against spironucleus because as you said, this one is a totally different ball game and it doesn't kill the fish for many, many months if not treated. It could be up to a year.
When I had a hexamita outbreak which lasted half a year, I tried fendbendazole(not flubendazole), praziquantel, seachem paraguard and finally jbl spirohexol which was the only one that stopped the deaths, so it was the only one effective. I still had the occasional fish succumb to hexamita over the years after that but as I said Epsom salt soaked food got rid of that for good and cured a very emaciated fish.

I have also read that hexamita and ich parasite are often found co-existing in fish with hole in the head like Oscars. This could be the case for clown loaches, but right now this is a speculation. But it would explain why some loaches are more difficult to cure from ich compared to others, as some may have both diseases and they need to be addressed at the same time. Hexamita weakens the immune system of the affected fish but may not manifest itself visually in months. With ich on top, fish find it hard to fight off the additional stressor.

[mikev]

No objections at all, it is always good to have more information, but you should have made a separate thread, nobody would see your post buried in this one.

OK.... reaction:

The study is likely faulty, for two reasons:

1. The list of tested meds includes flubendazole (failure) and albendazole (success). Actually these two meds are nearly identical and one should expect identical results in most cases. In some cases one med may work better than other, but for the most part it should not make a big difference. Other meds in this group include mabendazole and fenbendazole which unfortunately were not studied. Analogy for antibiotics is minocycline and doxycycline which also should perform identically in most cases.
2. Secondly, the meds were administered orally, and this is not how people use flubendazole.

Now, I do not have personal stake in this (I never hit hexamita infections myself), but it would be very interesting if you ask Dr. Charles Harrison to comment, he is the one who wrote about hexamita treatments and experimented with this. Please do.

And two more things: inclusion of levamisole in this study is stupid! Levamisole has no chance of working, it acts on the nervous system that hexamita does not have. If they see any positive effect of levamisole at all, the entire study is a fake to be dismissed. But not including meds like quinine and chloroquine is a defect in the study... in fact I'm curious about them, perhaps you can search around and see what is known about their action on hexamita?

Now, let me add 3. which is another argument not based on the author's of your paper errors.... it happens that meds fail against a disease in some specific cases. Consider Ick: flubendazole is usually effective against it, but there are strains where it fails. Quinine is usually effective too. Dye-based formulas are usually effective too. But: I had a case where I had to treat for 40 days with ALL THREE (actually, FIVE since Dye mix was 3 meds!) at once before Ick was eradicated. I know a person who is treating right now and he has been failing with quinine+flubendazole as of yesterday. TB treatment strategies are designed on trying one antibiotic and switching to another if it fails. So .. it is always possible to hit with a med that is 99% successful that remaining 1% case. (I do not ha

[Loachloach]

Yes, I agree, the method at which they administered the drug, the dosage, etc.. may make a difference, plus the strain of the disease itself. In the above study they are treating spironucleus salmonis.

I found another study about spironucleus vortens which is the most likely one affecting our fish. It says that dimetridazole, metronidazole were successful at "inhibiting" the growth of spironecleus vortents. Mebendazole was the most effective.

Fenbedanzole and albendazole "supressed" the growth of spironucleus only.

This study hasn't tested flubendazole. They tested magnesium sulphate but dosed in the water, not orally. There's another study about being administered orally from which the idea of Epsom salt soaked food being effective comes but I must find it.

http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/availa ... /ANGEL.PDF

[Loachloach]

Now, I do not have personal stake in this (I never hit hexamita infections myself)

I had a huge outbreak many years ago as I mentioned. It took me more than 6-8 months to stop my fish from dropping off randomly. I thought I cured it but I must have re- introduced it again because I kept having the odd fish succumb to it from time to time and that happened in different tanks. But I didn't dare treat on a mass scale again because I just thought it's impossible to fully eradicate and in most cases the disease only affects fish with weakened immune response after stress, hence people just have one or two fish in the pack showing signs. Plus as I mentioned before, I read it's very common in the industry, a lot of fish harbour it harmlessly without affecting them for life.

Then I found out that Epsom salt in food can bring back to life a fish on the brink of death and since then I've never seen that stuff again in my tanks. When I get new fish, I give them a weekly round of Epsom salt treated food just in case. My small clown loach is on it too right now as my big clowns were fed that already, although they never showed signs of hexamita.

Now, that I remember fully about it, besides seachem paraguard, fenbendazole and praziquantel, I also tried what's known as effective against hexamita, metronidazole. However, at that stage a lot of my fish weren't eating. And those that did, spit out any food treated with metro. It really stunk of med once you soak the food. Then in desperation I dosed the water column with metro but that thing wouldn't dissolve and had no effect whatsoever, not for me.

I then finally bought and dosed spiroxehol and saw an immediate improvement. It was a one off dose one needs to keep for a week, makes the water yellow and that got my tanks back on track. The ingredient is Aminonitrothiazole. So although a lot of those similar meds maybe have an effect to an extent, it depends at what stage of the disease one treats because when it's well advanced, you need something that kills the evil disease, not just supresses it because at some stage fish just have no immune response left. It's a very ugly disease if any fish make it to the final stages, knifeback, sunken belly, stringy poop, possibly protruding anus, gasping, loss of appetite, loss of balance, secondary bacterial infections...

That's my last two cents about it. I am glad I know how to treat this thing at least as I have been unsuccessful almost against anything else I've come across. Unless you know what you are treating against, the chances of hitting the right med at the right time are little. So hence I don't treat unless I am at least 80% certain.

[mikev]

Talk to Dr. Harrison if interested in learning more. All these studies have some value, but reality of treating is not in sufficient correlation with studies done on farm fish in different environments to take them as gospel.

[Loachloach]

Talk to Dr. Harrison if interested in learning more. All these studies have some value, but reality of treating is not in sufficient correlation with studies done on farm fish in different environments to take them as gospel.

Does he specialize in treating tropical fish or is he just a hobbist/chemist of some sort?

The second study on hexamita I posted is about angelfish/pterophyllum scalare, not about farmed fish.

The info you are referring to flubendazole being effective against hexamita is probably this one below by Charles Harrison. I don't doubt his conclusions and he maybe right. I've never tried flubendazole myself to treat hexamita. However, in the studies I posted it doesn't say that flubendazole or its sister drug albendazole is fully ineffective, but will not fully eradicate it at the same time. So how does Dr. Harrison knows he's fully eradicated it? Just because the fish is alive and reproduces afterwards? Most of the fish that have hexamita live a happy normal live if kept in quality conditions. Dr. Harrison says himself, he hasn't done a control study. He's seen the fish improve after administration of flubendazole.
However, as long as one minimizes the infection fish's immune system can deal with a few left over spironucleus monsters.
Here are his words:

In fish; as long as food passes through the gut and flushes away the Hexamita there is usually no
problem. If, however, the fish has a period of little or no food, hence little or no movement
through the gut, the infection and irritation flares up. The fish cannot swallow because of the
irritation and it just spits out its food. Some aquaria show the infection only after the keeper
changes the food or the feeding regimen, or forgets a water change. Being asymptomatic is
typical both in birds and fish. Moreover, aquarium residents don't show the affliction equally.
2
Some never show the symptoms while others in the same tank die of starvation. The mere
presence of the protozoan apparently is not the problem…more likely, it is the irritation that
causes the problem.

Here is his article:

http://www.inkmkr.com/Fish/FlubendazoleArticle.pdf