The Treatment Comes to an End.

This morning my japanese ranchu had completed 36 hours in the final treatment dose. Scrapes have shown ZERO parasites. Get in!! However, the ranchu were beginning to look very tired, most noticeably they were all breathing quite heavily and lacking appetite. I immediately refilled their main pond with prepared water. On moving them i noticed that one ranchu in particular has developed very bad veining in his tail fin and even  a couple of small sores on his back, which i suspect is related to being exposed to the formalin for this length of time.

Ranchu Parasites - A Closer Look and Plan B.

The ranchu have been moved into smaller temporary tubs whilst the pond has been "nuked" with a Potasium Permanganate treatment. Every effort will now be made to keep anything not sterilized from going into it. The ranchu will only go in there once i'm happy they are clean enough for the Winter and Spring periods. I really need to get them sorted quickly as i really want to start cooling them for a winter break as soon as possible.

My plan now is to attempt another course of FMG treatment. This time however i hope to use the smaller tubs, that I currently have the ranchu in. I intend to change the water daily, 100% fresh and with the required dose mixed in each day. Using the smaller tubs will help in a couple of ways:

1. I intend to increase the temperature this time, which will speed up the life cycle of the Costia, or even start killing them off if a high enough temperature is reached. 
2. It will keep the general level of waste down which should help the FMG perform to its potential (I also intend to feed even more strictly (or less) during this course. 
3. It will also keep the water in the best possible condition for the ranchu, which I hope will allow me to hold fire after the final dosage, giving the chemical an extra day or two to finish the job!

I managed to catch a decent mini clip of some of the little F#@%%@s today. This is from a scrape of a heater in one of the tubs which obviously gets some slime build up. It makes claims that parasites cannot live long off a host very questionable. Parasites shown on scrapes of the fish are still proving much harder to find thankfully, although they are there in very low numbers.

Back to the Drawing Board!

Twenty four hours passed since the final FMG dose was applied and scrapes of the pond, disappointingly, showed that the treatment had had very little impact. I pulled the fish out and put them into a smaller temporary tub. Out of interest, I dosed the fishless pond with another 25ml, left for several hours and again scraped the tub. You guessed it, Costia and Tetrahymena were still present in high numbers and looking just as active.

Ranchu Parasites

Having become somewhat obsessed with my new microscope, I have been inspecting many samples from the pond and the Ranchu in recent days.

The first issue identified clearly on the Ranchu were flukes. Both skin and gill flukes were identified following scrapes and a straight forward Praziquantel course of treatment appears to have successfully removed them.