Spotted Mandarin
 

I had flat worms cover my tank. I added a spotted mandarin (as it is natural food) and it literally wiped them out. The terminator. Possible this is a safe route to try. Beats chemical warfare!!!


Patrick

Mandarins work well most of the time for Red Planaria flatworms...but AEFW are way different...and WAY worse. Any fish added that helps is a blessing but it's a tough war against them.

Just a word of caution when using Revive...I did a mass dip with Revive a couple of weekends ago and thought to dip a bit longer than recommended and to date have lost 8 frags....so be careful and don't dip too long.

Good Luck with your battle...if you only have a few or less than 10 colonies...I'd consider taking them all out and trashing them....unless you have a tank big enough to QT them in...another thing that is suggested is adding Camel shrimp to the sump of the Q tank and rotating corals through the sump....put in sump for .5-1 hour and let shrimp pick off eggs and AEFW...them remove and put back in the QT display...watch shrimps closely..once they eat all the nasties they reportedly move on to eating the polyps.

Thanks for the info, I know after I added my Mandarin any larger brown/ red Flat worms were destroyed. Hope everything works out for you Mark.
Levi

Must depend on the coral...I forgot about 3 colonies in a revive dip for about 20 minutes a while back and all are still alive and well. I dip all my corals for 8 minutes or so and never lost one.

I found this useful link

http://www.melevsreef.com/aefw.html

We pulled all of our acros out last night and like GSP said there were egg strands at the bases. It was the bases that had indentations rather then being flat and molded with the corals. We did long dips in Revive, and put them in my 90g in the basement. I had no clue what was going on with my corals, since we changed the halides, and our well water is changing due to the run off and I thought our RO was not working properly.

So... don't know if it is too late for them or not. I am thinking they might be beyond the Revive now. Will be driving to the city to get the Betadine. The corals look terrible in the 90g and I am almost regretting taking action, but there was really no choice. The bad thing about being new in the hobby is I do get faced with an issue and my experience cannot pin point the issue until much later in the game.

Live and learn... at least the fish are fine.

Well i got to dipping the affected corals and the peices adjacent to them. Only the ones showing bites had the worms on them as near as i could tell.

I tossed my valida as the whole base was egg city, fragged a few tips off of it to see if i can save. Dip used was kent, couldnt find any betadine today so i grabbed this to try out. Stunned the worms, did not kill them, at the reccomended dosage.

took some pictures, will post them up in the AM. I was shocked at the size of some of these monsters, alot bigger than expected.

Before introducing new corals to my system I use Tropic Marin and/or Sea Chem iodine dips, they work pretty well.

As an alternative you can always try this camel shrimp cleaning tank idea.
http://www.korallen-zucht.de/index.p..._id=52&clang=1

As promised, here are some pictures, sorry for the poor quality.

picture of coral base with tons of eggs
http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q...m/IMG_1230.jpg

Another base shot
http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q...m/IMG_1245.jpg

In the bucket after a dip, penny for size reference
http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q...m/IMG_1247.jpg

Look at all this stuff knocked off with the dip
http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q...m/IMG_1248.jpg

When I did our dips, I did have an odd looking snail come off of one of the corals... now that I saw Snappy's post, I have an ID which is not a very good one. I have the 90g tank in the basement and will try the shrimp idea. We did dip everything in Revive prior to putting them into the tank, so I am not entirely sure what went wrong. I will be Qting corals from her eon in... I just think I will stop buying any coral for quite some time until I get this under control.

When we pulled the corals the other evening, we did find eggs hidden in one of the bases that probably were sheltered from the dip to a certain extent, like GSP had mentioned. I am glad I was able to learn from what happened, and if it was not for this post, I would still be struggling with this.

Also i think i pinned down who i got these from. I visited the suspected LFS yesterday and took a gander in thier sps tank, all the remaining acro peices are bit to shreds.