What does AEFW damage look like?

[Rice Reef]

Originally Posted by asylumdown

Ok, I'll pm him. I've now dipped the 4 closest Acro colonies to the one that was infested and nothing happened, no flatworms came off anything except the first piece that made me thing I might have it. Is there a possibility that it was just this one coral?

Received your pm. Feel free to call me tonight and I can share with you of my experience. Dipping the neighbouring colonies may not solve your problem and it is encouraged to remove all your acros and keep them in another tank. You will need to starve the AEFW in your main tank while dipping and monitoring all your acros in the other tank. Starving out the AEFW will take at least 8 weeks and for assurance do so for 12 weeks. This is probably the better method somit does not stress your fish and other corals and critters. As for the existing acros cut them off any existing plugs and bases and discard them ( plugs and bases). For any encrusted parts cover the areas with kalk paste. Continue to monitor them for dulling of the colours and loss of PE. And if need to dip again. Flatworm exit does not work for AEFW and nothing is really proven on the market that will destroy the eggs ( or prevent them from hatching) however RPS all out is said to be able to take care of this. There is a thread on RC and the individual there is sharing of his experience with the product.

AEFW is serious and can cost dearly... I have just recently threw out 10 plus pounds of corals and will have to start from scratch again. Good luck and hope you will not get discouraged.

[Myka]

Sorry to hear about your AEFW infection. That's the worst.

You can usually battle them by only dipping the Acros. You will find that AEFW have "favourite" coral and if you monitor those ones you should be able to tell if you're winning or losing.

[asylumdown]

I'm going to invest in a few more bottles of flatworm exit to make super concentrated dips. How many times a week do I need to dip my corals to make sure that any eggs that I miss hatch, but are killed before they get old enough to lay their own eggs?

[aqua80]

Originally Posted by asylumdown

I'm going to invest in a few more bottles of flatworm exit to make super concentrated dips. How many times a week do I need to dip my corals to make sure that any eggs that I miss hatch, but are killed before they get old enough to lay their own eggs?

flatworm exit don't work with aefw...
Rps all-out works well with the adults (as revive and coralrx) and maybe eggs, but that's not proven for now and if you dip many colonies you have to put them in QT tank...
Do as Rice Reef said to eradicate them... dipping 1x a week for 8 weeks is what I would do... keeping all acros out of the main tank...

Or have a couple of wrasse and blast your corals every once in while to live with them (what I am doing)

[asylumdown]

Flatworm exit certainly worked on my AEFW, but I was using a concentration of over 30 times the recommended dose. At that dose it also killed all the pods, bristle worms, and acropora crabs on my corals as well. In fact, the acropora crab's legs started falling off before they died, so I'm wondering if it somehow affects their connective tissue? The worms that were on the visibly damaged piece started curling up and dying the instant they went in the water with the flatworm exit. They fell off after about a minute, but again, we're talking concentrations several orders of magnitude higher than the bottle recommends. I would never put that high a dose in my display, as it would likely wipe it out.

I'm following the thread on Reef Central about RPS all out. I'm going to buy some, and hopefully the guy who's posting close up pictures of the eggs will report that they've all been killed by this treatment. QTing all 43 colonies of my acroporids for 8 weeks in a way that guarantees none of them die to to system instability or poor water quality will require nothing short of a second, fully established reef system with all the lights, flow and dosing equipment I have on my big tank. That's not a cost I'm capable of outlaying ATM, and after my experience with losing every single fish because of a QT system failure, I have little interest in courses of treatment that end up being worse than the disease. Whatever chemicals I use, the protocol will have to be dipping, then returning to the display.

[aqua80]

Originally Posted by asylumdown

I'm following the thread on Reef Central about RPS all out. I'm going to buy some, and hopefully the guy who's posting close up pictures of the eggs will report that they've all been killed by this treatment..

hehe that guy is me
for now after 8 days eggs seems intact... we'll see if they hatch...

I lost a couple of frags from the initial attack but after that everything is doing great, even if I do see some bite marks here and there and some adults when blasting....

In fact I believe there's many more AEFW tanks out there that people just don't know they have it... If you don't do QT on every coral you get you will have them someday (or you already have them...)
I dip every coral I put in my tank with coral rx and revive, removing the original plug etc... and still got them...

my tank is not doing so bad with them for the last 8 months (at least) :



melanurus wrasse, yellow wrasse and sixline are my friends...

but ReefBum is (was) the best looking tank with AEFW for sure :

[asylumdown]

oooh, you're Canadian?! Sweet, I'm really looking forward to the long term outcome of your test. My suspicion is that it won't kill the eggs of AEFW, the wording on the promotional materials is too vague. They list all the things that it kills, and then says in a blanket statement 'and kill the eggs too!'. It very likely kills the eggs of some of the things that All Out treats, but they very specifically never say 'kills AEFW and their eggs', which in my opinion was a very intentional wording choice.

However, the product does seem incredible effective at killing everything else. I only hope I can save some of my acropora crabs. I love those little guys, I have one in every colony large enough to house one.

[kien]

Originally Posted by aqua80

Or have a couple of wrasse and blast your corals every once in while to live with them (what I am doing)

With all the AEFW talk recently I did my fair share of googling and did find quite a few nice sps reefs that employ this methodology. They simply accept the fact that the worms are there and keep their population down so that they do not reach plague proportions and over run the colony. This appears to have worked for quite a few people. I myself would probably lean towards this. Once you have them you will probably have them FOREVER unless you throw away your entire stock or treat your entire stock all at once for weeks.

[asylumdown]

This quote from a thread on WAMAS' forum (http://wamas.org/forums/topic/33942-...m-aefw-thread/) is exactly why I don't want to QT all my acroporids:

"Through all of this - I lost no corals to AEFW. I lost corals to being moved around from tank to tank, and from over-long dipping, too-harsh dips, etc. But the AEFW damage corals pretty slowly. They are pretty fragile creatures, and rarely survive more than 24 hours in a cup of water at room temperature. They have a tendency to just 'dissolve' (autolyse) when they get stressed."

My knee jerk reaction to ich in my tank led to me killing every fish I had when the QT tank they were in over-heated. I'm sure some/most of those fish would still be alive if I had left them in the display and learned to manage ich. I wanted to 'eradicate' ich from my system - and I did, by eradicating all my fish. I'm going to try my best to manage this in a way that doesn't put the lives of my otherwise extremely healthy corals at risk. From what I can see after extensive searching, next to nothing is known about the life-cycle of this parasite, and the guy who wrote that long post found that even after leaving some acroporids in his tank while he experimented on the infected ones, his system was cleared of infection by treating the infected corals. That gives me some hope. I also found it interesting that he found crushed garlic pills would kill the flatworms at high concentrations. That might be something to invest in.

[Aquattro]

FWIW, I had AEFW years ago, long before anyone knew what they were. I saw a couple now and then under the scope, and just thought they looked cool and put them back in the tank. The tank thrived for years. I had a 6-line wrasse, not sure if that helped.
But the task of moving a full SPS into QT ,weekly dipping, etc, would probably be way worse than dealing with them in tank. Worst case, one coral gets hit bad, so toss it out. Unless these things were absolutely killing all my corals, I wouldn't do anything other than baste and buy wrasses.