Eliminating Blue Clove Polyps with Fenbendazole
- Thread starter TheRealChrisBrown
- Start date
Update: no Blue Clove Polyps anywhere to be seen! The treatment worked, and I’m seeing minimal side effects. I have more cyano in the display than before....but that isn’t necessarily from the treatment. Could be the dead tissue from the BCP. My derasa clam has had its incurrent siphon wider open than normal. Again, is that a result or biproduct of the fenbendazole? I don’t know.
So today I added a frag of GSP to the display to see if there is any of the medicine still in the water. If it dies I’d say it’s still present, if it lives I’d like to go ahead and reconnect the 40b to the main system.
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So today I added a frag of GSP to the display to see if there is any of the medicine still in the water. If it dies I’d say it’s still present, if it lives I’d like to go ahead and reconnect the 40b to the main system.
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So just a little 3 month update in case you were wondering. That frag of GSP in the previous post. It died. Within 2 days of going in it was obvious it wasn't going to make it. So I waited another month and tried again. Frag #2 of GSP died. Again within 48hrs. it was pretty evident that the frag wasn't going to make it. I waited another 6 weeks, and I ran into a logistical issue. I had the 40b with all of the GSP isolated from the main tank and sump, and I was doing just enough to keep it on life support (top off's, infrequent water changes, and it had it's own flow pump and heaters). However the problem arose when I needed to shut the power off to my house for 5 to 6 hours for some electrical work. I figured it was as good of a time as any to put the 40b back online with the entire system. So I started off real slow, with barely a trickle of water from main system to 40b. The GSP fought hard for a few days and it slowly retracted. The day of the big power outage I said to hell with it, and put the 40b fully back online. It's been 2 weeks, and I'm looking at a vast wasteland of dead GSP. I'm going to scrape it and remove it today. Between the last dose of medication and today I have done 6 water changes at 24g each. Looking back that probably wasn't enough, I probably should have been aiming for weekly WC's vs every other week or so.
Anyway, I'm not overly broken up about the GSP. It has given me a chance to re-think my 40b, so stay tuned on that. But I guess I can stop saying "I literally have GSP by the square foot to give away" lol. Oh, my point in this post. The fenbendazole is strong. I'd read that it can remain in the water for 3 months, I think I fully proved accidentally that it can. I would warn anyone who wants to get rid of the blue cloves that the fenbendazole absolutely works, and maybe you have some GSP you want to expel...it works for that too.
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Anyway, I'm not overly broken up about the GSP. It has given me a chance to re-think my 40b, so stay tuned on that. But I guess I can stop saying "I literally have GSP by the square foot to give away" lol. Oh, my point in this post. The fenbendazole is strong. I'd read that it can remain in the water for 3 months, I think I fully proved accidentally that it can. I would warn anyone who wants to get rid of the blue cloves that the fenbendazole absolutely works, and maybe you have some GSP you want to expel...it works for that too.
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Interesting write up! You mentioned using carbon, did you try other filter material like Poly Filters or some of the resins that remove organics (Seachem/TLF etc)? As one can't test for the presence of the drug, your canary in the coal mine approach (GSP) was a good one. It could also probably be broken down by ozone, however the odds of producing a harmful by product seems too risky.
@TheRealChrisBrown now that it’s been a few months have you noticed any other side effects on any other corals from using the fenbendazole? And would you do it again if you had to? I’m thinking about dosing my 300 gallon tank in efforts to get rid of brown star polyps.
@jcbarron44 Yep! I'd do it again in a heartbeat. I lost everything that "the experts" said I would lose. Most importantly to me, that was my GSP farm. However with all the dead GSP scraped out that 40b has had a transformation, it's now got some thriving anemones and starting to really look good (well, as good as a neglected tank in my basement could look)! Still no signs of the blue cloves! No ill effects to any of my SPS, LPS, nems, livestock, snails, shrimp and urchins. I guess I'd just warn you to see what it negatively interacts with, mainly Blue cloves, GSP, anthilia, cloves.....things in that family of coral. If you want to keep any of that, you might be looking at needing to put it in a separate system for long term?
Interesting that you lost no inverts. In the couple tanks Ive treated weve lost all the snails, also experienced huge hair algae blooms, probably due to the snail die off. One tank I had to treat twice as the blue snowflake polyps started coming back, the second treatment did wipe out the vermatid snails which was definitely an unforeseen positive affect, second treatment also took out the gonis in the tank as well as a large hollywood stunner. All and all Id say the treatments worked for what we were trying to achieve with just a few minor adverse affects.
It is worth noting the tank that was treated twice was completely overrun with the blue snowflake polyps. Im assuming with the amount of die off from the polyps alone may have been what contributed to the additional losses we experienced as well as the algae bloom. I never detected a NO3 or PO4 spike though, water chemistry stayed pretty consistent.
One of the other tanks I treated was prepped before treatment. All snails were removed and this tank only had a couple small patches of the red snowflake polyps, so not nearly as much to kill. Did not see the adverse affects in this tank at all, which house mainyl SPS with 2 very large sunburst anemones.
Just my added to cents based on my experience.
It is worth noting the tank that was treated twice was completely overrun with the blue snowflake polyps. Im assuming with the amount of die off from the polyps alone may have been what contributed to the additional losses we experienced as well as the algae bloom. I never detected a NO3 or PO4 spike though, water chemistry stayed pretty consistent.
One of the other tanks I treated was prepped before treatment. All snails were removed and this tank only had a couple small patches of the red snowflake polyps, so not nearly as much to kill. Did not see the adverse affects in this tank at all, which house mainyl SPS with 2 very large sunburst anemones.
Just my added to cents based on my experience.
@TheRealChrisBrown @ReefCheif
Thank you both for the responses on your experiences. What dose did you guys use when treating your tanks? 1gm/gallon? 2gm/gallon?
Thank you both for the responses on your experiences. What dose did you guys use when treating your tanks? 1gm/gallon? 2gm/gallon?
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