HELP! Flat worms

[waltercat]

I have a small outbreak of flatworms. I can see about 20-30. I have FWE and am going to treat my tank. However I do not have a canister filter to run activated carbon.

Does anyone have one I can borrow? I can float you some frags for your kindness. I have some nice frogspawns and red montipora.

I am in Manhattan, so if you are here that's good too!

Thanks!

 

[DEEPWATER]

i would get a mesh bag to put the carbon in and have some freashly made salt water ready to do a water change after the FWE

I would siphon out as many flat worms as you can before the treatment .alsp make sure you have a net ready to catch the dead FW

Good luck

Ronen

 

[tomzpc]

Glad you're not wasting any time to treat them. The time to hit them is the time that you start to see them. How about a hang-on skimmer or maybe can you rig up a bag of charcoal on a sump drain or return line?

You're probably aware of this but do a water change and siphon out the dead FW's as you see them. Good luck!

 

[marrone]

I would try to siphon them out before I would use FWE. You can do this over a # of days and is better than using FWE.

If you do plan on using FWE do a search on RC as there have been a lot of bad exprecience with it. Also it doesn't always work the first time and you usally need to treat atleast twice.

 

[inline6]

Waltercat, Listen to Marrone his advice is sound.
I would not use FWE only because of the bad experiences of others with this product.

I would ease off on feeding your tank as much as possible, flatworms eat alot of excess foods. Try introducing a natural predator (do a search on MR for this topic)

Good Luck!

-inline

I would try to siphon them out before I would use FWE. You can do this over a # of days and is better than using FWE.

If you do plan on using FWE do a search on RC as there have been a lot of bad exprecience with it. Also it doesn't always work the first time and you usally need to treat atleast twice.

 

[waltercat]

Thanks for all the support. I've done my research and I plan to do a water change. I think all the badd experiences is from the huge die off. I don't have enough in my tank to warrant a huge die off.



Siphoning won't work, I've been trying to do that for the past few weeks, the population is just getting bigger. I need to use FWE. I feel comfortable with doing it, I just don't know if the carbon will work in my skimmer, it sounds like I need high water flow through the carbon. Will activated carbon in my remora skimmer work?

 

[jackson6745]

Walter if you use a reactor the carbon would work best. Get a Phosban reactor.

 

[tomzpc]

Flatworm Exit is entirely safe. It's the toxins released by the flatworms that are the problem as Waltercat has found in his research. I know people who have doses at 5 times the recommended dosage with no ill-effects whatsoever to there tanks. But you most definitely want to be aggressive with some fresh carbon and you want to be sure to vacuum out as many of the flatworms as you can see both before and after dosing the tank with FWE.

 

[waltercat]

BTW, I ended up dosing twice, two weeks apart and do not see any more flatworms. I didn't run carbon because there were only about 20 flatworms to kill and I did a 20% water change 2 hours after I dosed.

Haven't seen a flatworm in about a month. Knock on wood.

 

[saltman123]

I too am fighting them. I have the cremish colored ones, not the red ones that like to hang on the glass. I build a suction tube that makes it super easy to suction them out so I am going to do a manual removal to see if it helps. If not, I have FWE waiting.